13 Facts About Judah Alkalai

Judah ben Solomon Chai Alkalai was a Sephardic Jewish rabbi, and one of the influential precursors of modern Zionism along with the Prussian Rabbi Zvi Hirsch Kalischer.

Judah Alkalai studied in Jerusalem, which belonged to the Ottoman Turkish Empire, under different rabbis and came under the influence of the Kabbalah.

In 1852, Judah Alkalai established the Society of the Settlement of Eretz Yisrael in London.

In 1871 Judah Alkalai visited Jerusalem and established another short-lived colonization society.

Judah Alkalai died in 1878, days after his native Bosnia was occupied by the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and was buried in the ancient Mount of Olives Jewish Cemetery.

Judah Alkalai's view of Jewish return to the Land of Israel was a religious one.

Judah Alkalai maintained, based on an ample body of religious literature, that the coming of the Messiah and divine redemption of the Jews required their return to the Promised Land.

Judah Alkalai's began by writing in Ladino, which limited his outreach to the rather small European Sephardic community.

Judah Alkalai's plan called for the creation of a representative "Assembly of Jewish Notables" who would advocate the case of a Jewish return to the Land of Israel, and for the settlement of the land using funds collected from Jewish communities in form of a tithe, a tenth of one's income, a practice called halukka and already used for supporting the religious groups inhabiting the Jewish Four Holy Cities.

In Minchat Yehudah Judah Alkalai proposes a return to the roots: the restoration of Hebrew as the Jewish national language, the recovery of land of Israel by purchasing it much like Abraham did with the cave and field of Machpelah in Hebron, and agriculture as the basis for renewed Jewish settlement.

For practical reasons and in spite of being a traditionalist who opposed Reform Judaism, Judah Alkalai attempted to achieve national unity.

Judah Alkalai's work, Goral la-Adonai, published in Vienna in 1857, is a treatise on the restoration of the Jews to their ancestral homeland, and suggests methods for the betterment of conditions in the Land of Israel.

Judah Alkalai joined the first Jewish organisation for the agricultural settlement of the Land of Israel, the Kolonisations-Verein fur Palastina, established in Frankfurt in 1860 by Chaim Lorje.