The Religious Establishment and the Zionist Movement

20/07/2026

By Hicham Bou Nassif | Weinberg Associate Professor of International Relations and the Middle East and George R. Roberts Fellow at Claremont McKenna College-California 

Significant segments of the Jewish religious establishment opposed the idea of establishing a Jewish national homeland, as well as the leaders of the Zionist movement who promoted it in the nineteenth century. While this article cannot examine all the reasons behind the rabbis’ opposition to Theodor Herzl’s vision of Jewish national liberation, their objections can be broadly summarized into three main factors: religious, self-interest considerations, and political.

On the religious level, anti-Zionist rabbis argued that Zionism represented a deviation from Judaism because, according to their belief, the establishment of a Jewish state was the task of the awaited Messiah rather than an organized political movement. Out of self-interest, many religious leaders feared losing their position as the leaders of the Jewish people if Herzl and his successors succeeded in winning Jewish loyalty. Politically, rabbis worried that the creation of a Jewish national homeland would expose Jews living abroad to accusations of dual loyalty — that is, being insufficiently loyal to the countries in which they lived. The determined opposition of the religious establishment was one of the factors that hindered the Zionist movement in its early years. Indeed, for a long time, Zionists remained a minority among Jews, particularly among the Jewish communities of Western Europe and North America.

In fact, the early Zionists faced strong opposition not only from the Jewish religious establishment but also from advocates of Jewish integration into their countries of residence, who argued that Jews were citizens of their respective states and therefore had no need for a separate national project. Unlike supporters of a Jewish homeland, integrationists maintained that Jews constituted a religious community rather than a nation seeking a homeland. In other words, Jews in Russia were Russian citizens, Jews in Poland were Polish citizens, Jews in Germany were German citizens, and so on. They also believed that the consolidation of equal citizenship would gradually eliminate religious discrimination and antisemitism, and that the rise of secularism would ultimately resolve the challenges facing religious minorities, including Jews.

Within this context, tens of thousands of Jews supported the Bundists, a Jewish socialist movement that opposed Zionism on the grounds that it undermined the interests of the Jewish proletariat. The Bundists argued that Marxism — not a national homeland — was the path to liberation.

Influenced by the campaigns of both anti-Zionist religious leaders and the left-wing Bundists, millions of Jews placed their hopes in integrating into European societies rather than leaving Europe at the earliest opportunity. Then the Nazis came to power in Germany, and neither religious eschatology nor the utopian promises of the left protected anyone from the Holocaust.

The tragedy of European Jewry offers a twofold lesson for any community seeking national liberation. First, the religious establishment may become one of its fiercest opponents rather than its ally. Second, internal ideological conflict within the community is unavoidable alongside its struggle against external adversaries. The relationship between advocates of integration and supporters of national liberation is, at its core, one of mutual negation: the advance of one camp necessarily comes at the expense of the other, and vice versa.

This article was originally published in Arabic by Nida al-Watan on 20 July 2026. The original can be found here.

The views expressed in this op-ed are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of SyriacPress.