Rabbi Yehuda Chai Alkalai רבי יהודה חי אלקלעי
rabbi of Zemun, who called for the return half a century before Herzl
He was born in Sarajevo, studied in Jerusalem, and served in Zemun—a small town outside Belgrade, on the very border of two empires. From there he began to say what no one had said from a rabbinical pulpit before him.
His argument came from the sources. Redemption, he wrote, comes in two stages: first the "beginning of redemption", what people do with their own hands, and only then the complete one. So one may not wait idle: land must be bought, settlements established, a communal treasury gathered, and an assembly of elders set up for the whole people. And Hebrew must be returned to everyday speech: "let the holy tongue be our tongue"—because a people speaking ten languages will not gather into one.
The spur was the Damascus blood libel of 1840: it showed that there was protection nowhere. His books—Darkhei Noam, Minchat Yehuda, Goral la-Shem—travelled among the communities and were read long before the word "Zionism" was spoken. Shimon Leib Herzl, Theodor's grandfather, belonged to his Zemun congregation. In 1874 Alkalai himself went up to the Land of Israel and died in Jerusalem.
On the timeline
Places
Related
Sources
Acharonim and later rabbinic literature
- Minchat Yehuda and Goral la-Shem of Rabbi Yehuda Alkalai — his argument from the sources and his call for living Hebrew
Scholarship
- The standard reference works and encyclopedias — the years 1798-1878, his service in Zemun, his aliyah in 1874
Basis: documents and evidence.