Aton Holzer
[After the Jewish sage’s lengthy disquisition on the distinctiveness of the Land of Israel,] the Khazar [king] said: In that case, you are falling short of what is required by your Law, because you do not go to this place and make it your life’s abode—and [the abode] of your death as well—when you [keep on] saying: Have mercy upon Zion because it is our life’s abode, and believe that the Divine Presence is going to return to it… But surely your bowing down and bending your knee towards it are either acts of hypocrisy or rote worship, practiced without any thought (cf. Isa. 29:13)…
The sage said: You have certainly reproached me [legitimately], O King of the Khazars… If we were prepared to meet the Lord of our fathers with pure intent, He would help us just as He helped our fathers in Egypt. Therefore, our saying, Bow down towards His holy mountain … and bow down to His footstool!… He who restores His Divine Presence to Zion, and similar such things are only like the [mindless] warbling of starlings and parrots. We do not realize what we are saying in this regard or in regard to other things as well, just as you said, O Commander of the Khazars. (Judah Ha-Levi, Kuzari 2:23-24, trans. Barry Kogan, Yale University Press, forthcoming.)[1]
Having been raised as a religiously observant Jew in the United States, in a family with a rabbi and rebbitzen for patriarch and matriarch whose lodestar was Jewish literacy, liturgy and learning, who went on all fours with two year-old me to teach me the “alef-bais” – I was blessed to inhabit a feeling of continuity with the civilization of my forefathers unselfconsciously for all my childhood. [2]
The sense of longing for the Land of Israel was inculcated within me at a crucial, precritical time, the first ten to thirteen years of life, when I sensed God to be everywhere, all the time. This enchanted time perhaps had best access to Biblical theology as Benjamin Sommer tries to reconstruct it – the sense of God immanent everywhere, the “prophecy [which is] now relegated to the insane and children” (Bava Batra 12b) – before my developing mind could be exposed to the twin colonizers of the Jewish mind: (1) classical antiquity, the Hellenizing intellectualization of God to a transcendent prime mover atop, but at great remove from, the Ptolemaic universe He animates; and (2) two millennia on, the secularizing winds of enlightenment and modernity, in which Cartesian dualism banished God from science and metaphysics altogether and confined Him to the prison of the private and personal. All (or nearly all) but the most enclave-bound Jews are, these days, marched into these mental ‘exiles,’ – and require a Ricœurian second and third naïveté.
This longing – perhaps indigenous? – had nothing to do with the political movement called Zionism. It shouted from every page of the liturgy, itself mostly composed in classical antiquity, from the prayers in that first Siddur we received in first grade and recited daily until they rolled off our tongues – the blessings in the thrice-daily Amidah pleading for a return to Zion with His great shofar blast and restoration of its judiciary, capital, monarchy, and Temple service, the Grace after meals that is preceded by Psalm 126, the epitome of longing for restoration, and whose three blessings narrow their focus from all the world to the Land to Jerusalem and its Temple. The Jewish holidays – in an insular orthodox community, a time of joy and wonder, with exotic flora and dishes, special melodies, blessings from the kohanim – was punctured at its climax, the late morning mussaf-repetition, by the discordant dirge of Eikha: ‘rebuild Your House as in the beginning, and establish Your Sanctuary on its site. Show us its rebuilding and gladden us with its restoration.’
The effect was a deep sense, at my very core, that the promised land was where we needed to be, where I and my community inexorably will be, in our lifetimes, be-hayeikhon u-be-yomeikhon – and were bound for, any minute now, if I just prayed with enough kavvanah this Tish’a Be-Av, or Yom Kippur, or even this afternoon – “today even, if you will only hearken to His voice!” (Psalms 95:7). I remember this vividly because it remains preserved in my religious consciousness, and I suspect perhaps all who share this sort of childhood – except perhaps the most ‘socially Orthodox’. It erupts in discrete moments in adulthood, either of vulnerability or exultation – no matter how far I find myself mired in the abstractions and distractions of post-modern maturity.
And yet this had everything to do with Zionism, and immigration to Israel – in ways that are patently obvious, at least to me. Yet for others, this proposition is curiously nonintuitive, and even controversial – and it is worth examining why.
In his recent The Necessity of Exile,[3] Shaul Magid recounts precisely the inverse experience: raised without much feeling for Judaism or Israel, finding both, and then rethinking the latter, as an adult. Magid argues that Zionism must be extricated from Judaism. From Rav Shagar, the Satmar Rav, the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and R. Aaron Samuel Tamares, Magid evinces a theology that the messianic realization, the expiration of exilic existence, is, authentically conceived, ‘not yet’; there is (always) work to be done, exilic ‘air’ to be purified; the real arena of Jewish existence is the diaspora, and redemption is always a dream to be deferred, something perhaps tomorrow but not today. As theory, can this argument be sustained?
To be sure, that strand, ‘not yet’, certainly does exist in contemporary Orthodox Jewish thought. After the disenchantment that came with Enlightenment, the loss of fervent belief and God-consciousness – Haym Soloveitchik’s “touch of His presence,”[4] or yir’at shamayim – messianic expectation soon degenerates into Yeshayahu Leibowitz’s cynical bon mot “the Messiah that comes cannot be the Messiah,” which inevitably renders waiting for him as absurd as waiting for Samuel Beckett’s Godot. It derives in part from more elaborate justifications of the exile that developed in the sixteenth century, which the late Professor Shalom Rosenberg[5] argued emerged from the realities of the Spanish expulsion. The traditional ‘galut-as-punishment’ idea was no longer tenable, especially when the Church preached the same view to underscore the truth of its teachings. The other old notion of hevlei mashiach, that the travails of diaspora were the birth pangs of the messiah – and that Jews would soon be rewarded in recompense for their prolonged misery – faded quickly as the decades passed from 1492 and 1507. The Lurianic emphasis on raising up the holy sparks of divinity scattered in the husks of the exilic wasteland emerged from Safed to kindle religious fervor in Jewish Eastern Europe, and it found complementarity in non-mystical theory of a “light unto the nations,” to instruct humanity in the ways of righteousness, which came to animate both the fathers of German reform and R. Samson Raphael Hirsch in the Jewish West. In a classic essay some time ago, Shalom Carmy showed how these and prior approaches gave rise to rationalizations, if not necessarily idealizations, of Jewish non-territoriality in the more comfortable diasporic experiences of late modernity.[6]
But to the pre-Modern Jewish mind, the one reinforced daily in prayer and the rock of Jewish piety and fervor, the promised Messianic age is never “not yet.”
Rather, it is “always already”: in philosophy, a technical term for a condition always present, with no identifiable beginning – but an apt formula for the primal Jewish emotional relationship with messianic anticipation. The morning prayer is commonly closed with the thirteen Maimonidean principles, including faith in the messiah: “I believe with complete faith in the coming of the Messiah, and though he may delay I wait daily for his coming.”
Students of classical and medieval Jewish history know that Jews have been seizing upon world events, positive or negative, as signs of the already-beginning restoration from as long ago as the reign of Emperor Hadrian, and then every century after the translocations of Jewish centers to Europe and the Christian millennium, starting with an infamous tenth-century responsum from the Halakhists of the geonic academy in Jerusalem to Ashkenazic interlocutors, the first we possess – criticizing them for inquiring about the date of the messianic end. This continues through the great hopes for 1096-“ranu cycle”[7] that were so cruelly dashed by the Crusader massacres along the Rhineland, but renewed in each new Hebrew century from Judah Ha-Levi’s own pilgrimage to the Crusader Kingdoms around 1140, to the “Aliyah of three hundred rabbis,” Tosafists and disciples who came to Late Ayyubid levant in the 1240s, who joined Maimonideans following Rambam’s own calculation-date for prophetic renaissance around 1216; to the 1440s movement from Spain, North Africa and Italy, which set the stage for the great renaissance in Safed in 1540 and both the unifying, Sanhedrin-priming Shulhan Arukh and messianic Lurianic kabbalah which emerged – laying the ground for the Sabbatean messianic eruption after 1640, the attempted arrival of the Gaon of Vilna and the Ba’al Shem Tov after 1740, and their students around 1840.[8] Not only the Khazars, but also the early Muslims (and for Abraham Abulafia and others, even the Mongol hordes who nearly liberated the land from the Mamluks) were regarded as messianic warriors, perhaps the ten lost tribes of Israel[9] who would provide ready-made military reinforcements to instantly restore Jewish sovereignty and Judaism from a ‘despised faith’ to its rightful place among world powers.
And the sense of messianic imminence and eschatological immanence has not been snuffed out. The most modern of Hasidim and their peculiar messianic view, which Magid describes as a ‘not yet’ approach – was transformed, as early as the 1970’s, into ‘Moshiach Now’, a movement whose fringes teeter on the theological brink, but whose mainstream is of a piece with all that came before it. Of this, David Singer wrote cogently,
“…genuine longing for the coming of the messiah is bound to trigger periodic eruptions along the lines of Lubavitcher messianism. Simply put, this is the price of religious authenticity. Far worse than the disruptive presence of the Lubavitcher messianists on the current Orthodox scene would be their total absence. An Orthodox Judaism in which hope for the messiah remained permanently fixed at the level of pious affirmation would be nothing more than a religious mummy.”[10]
And it is not limited to Chabad. Nearly every major event in world or Israel’s history sees the circulation among religious Jews of texts that are interpreted – often with great liberties – to have predicted it, typically linking it to an imminent messianic arrival, much to the chagrin of Orthodox intellectuals, not least for its capacity to “dull the urge to ethical action”.[11] But the persistence of the phenomenon seems to speak to something deep, even primal, about our Jewishness.
If the Mongols are the ten tribes, then of course a Jewish army which re-establishes Jewish life in the Holy Land – with courts that draw upon mishpat ivri, with its capital in a Jerusalem ha-benuyah, full of towers and cranes of rebuilding – is of an eschatological moment. Our Chabad shliach in Alabama did not recite Hallel on 5 Iyyar, to be sure, but every year would tell the story of the veteran elderly Hasid in Kfar Habad, who would spontaneously dance in the streets on Yom ha-Atzma’ut, telling onlookers, “I can’t help it, my feet need to dance.”
It would seem to me that Magid is quite correct that Judaism does not agree with the secular Zionist ‘negation of exile.’ But this is not because ‘not yet’ diasporic existence is more important than an actual ‘redemption’ – it is because the spiritual riches of exile were always contingent upon the drama of a redemption constantly bursting into reality. Diasporas were always anticipating, and beginning to consummate, the reconstitution of a civilization upon its land.
To be fair, however, this is not the full picture. Magid is correct about a historical Jewish ambivalence toward Aliyah; it is also real, and – for reasons quite different from modern valorizations of exile – also precedes modernity.
As it turns out, the focus of Jewish hopes and dreams became a center for another “always already” – but of a vastly different variety. The ideology of the Christian monastic movement, as articulated by Jerome (342-420) – of Stridon, and crucially, for the last thirty-four years of his life, Bethlehem, on the cusp of the Judean desert – is the possibility of “realized eschatology” in this world; but a decidedly other-worldly eschatology. “Dying to the world” by giving up one’s earthly possessions, and withdrawing from incorrigibly sinful human society to the desert, enables the monk to “carry with them Jesus’ mortification bodily and live not according to the flesh but spirit.”[12] The movement began with solitary monks (anchorites), and quickly came to encompass highly organized communities of ascetics in monasteries (cenobites).
After Constantine, an indisputably Jewish Holy Land was transformed into a vast network of monasteries and late antique Christian cities, which existed in reciprocal relationship, providing education and receiving material support. Constantine himself had remade Jerusalem, its new Temple – the Church of the Holy Sepulchre – juxtaposed against the Temple’s ruins, as a Christian focus of pilgrimage. The earliest Pilgrimage account, the Itinerarium Burdigalense from 333-334, already draws the intended contrast between the desolate, destroyed Temple mount, now a refuse dump,[13] and the New Jerusalem then taking shape. Christianization reached its peak by the reign of Justinian, and the conscious dispossession of Jews from their own homeland is lamented in the works of sixth-century payyetan Yannai.[14]
Recent scholarship[15] argues that this new configuration of the land persisted even beyond the Muslim conquest, until a key event: the cataclysmic Galilee earthquake of 749. The ruin that was wrought upon the center of Jewish life in the Galilee was catastrophic; tens of thousands were killed, and a fast day with its own liturgy was created to commemorate the event, on the twenty-third of Shevat. Communities responded in diverse ways to the destruction, often preserving synagogue ruins as a visual commemoration.[16] But Jewish life went on.
For the Christians of the Holy Land, the event was transformative. The city wealth that sustained the monasteries, and much of the human capital, was gone. A ‘rapid involution’ occurred. Many churches in the north were not rebuilt, and many which were demonstrate only partial restoration, ‘narrowing of the sacral space’ to adjust to limited resources and fewer attendees, while most of a church was left in ruins.[17] By 950, the Christian cultic network was reduced to core nuclei around Jerusalem and the Judean desert.
For Western Christians, this new reality – perfect for the ascetic life, re-invigorated in the monastery by the incipient Cistercian revolution – helped spur the Crusades, which blurred monastic ideology, pilgrimage and holy war.[18] The Holy Land was the perfect place for the devout. The only barrier could be sinful attachment to this-worldly pleasures.
For Jews, the situation was a bit more complex. For Rabbanite Judaism, monastic asceticism is problematic. For one thing, the Babylonian Talmud takes a jaundiced view of mortification of the flesh,[19] which dovetails with the sensibilities of its decidedly more “body-positive”[20] Zoroastrian milieu. But more importantly, the Rabbis (Mishnah Avot 2:4, Ta’anit 11a) adjure against the apotaktikoi, the renunciant from society, which it terms poresh min ha-tzibbur – an unforgivable act of hubris. Where Christians sought out the intercessory prayers of the monks, the Talmud (Berakhot 8a) inverts the equation: God is more favorably inclined to the prayer of the congregation than the individual.
When the Crusaders arrived and eliminated almost all remnants of the indigenous Jewish population – and when the Abbasids and Mamluks subsequently destroyed most of the Crusader fortifications, including the walls of Jerusalem – relocating to the Holy Land ceased to be aliyah and instead became Moses’ e’ebrah na, ‘crossing over,’[21] akin to a hermit’s monastic vow; it required abandoning one’s community, family and spouse – effectively, celibacy – to live a lonely life among desolate, unsafe ruins. For Spanish and French Jewry, this was no deterrent. Judah Ha-Levi abandoned Andalusia, acclaim, and Aristotelianism to act upon the ideals of his Sefer Kuzari; Nahmanides favored asceticism and saw in it, and aliyah, a way to cleave unto the Source of prophecy.[22] The motive of the ‘three hundred Rabbis,’ French Tosafists, to establish a pious (cenobitic monastic?) elite to stimulate messianic warfare, was a product of cultural coproduction with Crusader ideology.[23] Even prior to the renaissance in Safed, that city became a focus for burial of diaspora Jews, as well as elderly Jews who left their families to come die in the Holy Land[24] — perhaps not quite so different from their Christian neighbors who took monastic vows on their deathbeds.
But with the twinning of aliyah and monasticism came age-old Rabbinic reservations, ones which surfaced specifically among the leading lights of the German Jewish community in the thirteenth to fourteenth centuries: the pietist R. Eliezer ha-Darshan of Würzburg, the early Tosafist R. Hayyim ha-Kohen of Mainz,[25] and the late Tosafist, R. Meir of Rothenberg (although the latter himself apparently began to make the trek).[26] These figures hailed from a community that particularly developed the idea of kehillah kedosha, the sacred congregation, a belief in the intrinsic holiness of the community by dint of their Jewish identity – at odds with the Christian view, both of Jews, of course, but also of ordinary Christian societies, which monks sought to renounce.[27] Despite their own ascetic inclinations, Ashkenazic leaders protested the abandonment of family, sustenance, and study toward the aim of aliyah. They would not abide individualistic pious gestures that seemed to protest, and threatened to subvert, the solidarity and fabric of the holy collective.
Echoes of this voice – to be sure, a minority one – outlasted the return of sizable Jewish populations to the Land. In a classic article,[28] Aviezer Ravitzky catalogues the sorts of anxieties about the Holy Land that emerge in the medieval period, out of the very forces that long attracted Jews to the land: who am I to leave my community for a land suffused with holiness? How can I be sure that I won’t fail to observe its special laws? Perhaps, God forbid, I am rushing the End and will sin there, and bring calamity upon myself and the Jewish people. Worst of all, perhaps I will sacrifice all, and come – and I (or my spouse, or my teenagers) will fail to achieve ascetic bliss, the dreams I projected upon the land will crumble under its austere conditions – or nowadays, just the banal quotidian – and I will be left with nothing at all.
Contemporary Jewry found diverse ways to cope with the problem. American Jews mostly stayed put, and clung to the dream, projecting their utopian yearnings and dreams for America – often the opposite of what they themselves lived – upon their views of Zion.[29]
Secular Zionism sought to surgically detach Jewish nationalism from its cultural imaginary and leave relics like ontology, nomos and eschatology entirely aside; Jews could come and possess the land, and that would be all. In the face of obvious divine intervention, one just closes one’s eyes and sings “nes lo kara lanu, pakh shemen lo matzanu” more loudly. Since everyone must dream, Zionism would craft a different, secular dream, one which, as it turns out, changes each generation as new fashions replace the old.
Some Haredim also deny reality, locked into a nineteenth-century decision on the Zionist heresy that obliges them to take an implausibly dark view of a Jewish army, the miracles of ’48 and ’67, a sabbath/kosher observant public sector, even a kippah-clad Prime Minister. It is all status quo ante, more of the same golus, something which theologically must not be, is forbidden to be, the mere start of redemption. It is the devil’s work; the better it seems, the worse it really is. Magid mercifully spares us some of the darker, more painful, regrettable citations from the Satmarer Rav’s output. The dream of redemption remains, but becomes ever more fantastic, supernatural, removed from reality. Ironically, in modernity, out of piety rather than secularism, some of this ostensibly ultra-orthodox branch actually finally abandoned ‘always already’ for the decidedly unorthodox, thoroughly modern ‘not yet.’
Religious Zionism would come to fully embrace a theology of ‘always already,’ but shove their anxieties into a smaller space: before ’67, the Old City of Jerusalem; after ’67, the Temple Mount,[30] thus displacing the beating heart – hopes, prayers, yearning, the longing which was the engine of Jewish tenacity for millennia – into a walled enclosure, a chest, the ‘egg’ housing the lifeforce of Koshchei the deathless of Slavic folklore: and woe betide us if it is ruptured. The holiday of Religious Zionism, Yom Yerushalayim, celebrates Jerusalem by marching through the Old City, through the Arab Souk – which covers Wilson’s arch, the most direct ancient road to the axis mundi – and stopping short, ending at the Wall; as with any collision, kinetic energy is converted to heat and sound, and it is sadly in evidence with increasing frustration and unbecoming behavior on the march’s youthful fringes.
The marchers stop. Not because they fear they will collapse Zionism, as Tomer Persico suggested.[31] What holds the Religious Zionists back are the anxieties that held Jews back for a millennium. The sum of all hopes cannot be constricted any further than the Temple Mount. But perhaps we are unworthy. What if to live the dream is to kill it?
And so all Jews, diasporic and Israeli alike, remain, like Naomi Shemer’s Jerusalem of Gold, shevuyah ba-haloma, imprisoned in their dreams.
The touchstone of my memories of childhood longing for the land was one specific place: the balcony of the executive suite of the King Solomon Hotel. From 1992, my grandparents, Rabbi Emanuel and Norma Holzer – American Jewish organizational leaders, who would travel several times a year to Israel – would stay at the hotel. They would bring me on a yearly basis and whenever I came with them – and later, when I was there for summer camp, or those gap years in Israel – I would visit with them there. The view from the balcony of the Old City of Jerusalem brought to life, in my mind, Naomi Shemer’s anthem of longing:
Mountain air as clear as wine and the scent of pine,
Borne on the evening wind with the sound of bells.
Jerusalem from that distance was the opposite of all that I lived in America. The longue durée, mysterious, tranquil, that axis so far removed from the ephemeral, career, consumerism, turmoil and stress. I longed, with every fiber of my being, to ‘cross over’. But, a good American Jew, it didn’t occur to me to actually do so – who am I to live on the axis mundi? When I ultimately made ‘aliyah, at the suggestion of my visionary wife, I came “clear-eyed,” with a career in Tel Aviv and plenty of possessions, living in the anglo preserve of Beit Shemesh, in the space between ‘always already’ and ‘not yet’.
The King Solomon was sold some time ago and sat empty for a while. The hotel reopened in 2023 under new management, rebranded as the Cassia. My parents came to visit and decided, for old time’s sake, to give it a try for Shabbat. Our family joined them.
We knew something was unusual when we walked into the hotel synagogue for kabbalat Shabbat – the prayerbooks were nearly all eidot ha-mizrah, of Mizrahi Jews from Arab lands. Soon, the room filled with men greeting each other heartily in Hebrew – all of whom seemed to know each other well – and the crowd sang the psalms, in a lilting North African maqām, in unison and then with each member participating as though rehearsed. This was something quite unusual for a Jerusalem hotel, in which guests are in the main Ashkenazic, American, strangers to one another, and prayer leadership is distributed ad hoc. This, clearly, was a community.
When we arrived at the dining room, passing children who appeared very much at home in every nook and cranny, it became clear very quickly that we were the lone ‘outside’ guests in a hotel of mefunim, evacuees, from Kiryat Shemona – the development town way up north that absorbs missiles in every Lebanon conflict. After communal singing and Kiddush, one after another, families came to talk to us, inviting us to join them in zemirot, bringing their babies to play with us, one older man sharing swashbuckling stories of his policeman father in Morocco, pouring cups of Arak.
I was reminded of the lyrics of an 1982 Safam song:
Sitting in a hall in Kiryat Sh’mona,
With Jews from Syria, from Yemen and Iran,
The only Ashkenazi in Kiryat Sh’mona,
I can hear their laughter but I cannot understand.
Just another foreigner in another foreign land,
But these strangers are my brothers as they take me by the hand.
“Aleikhem salaam, Salaam aleikhem, (heim sharu)
Bruchim haba’im, shalom aleichem.”
But of course, this generation spoke Hebrew, so we very much did understand. And they indeed took us by the hand.
When the Arak-pourer had finished his story, we asked the obvious question. It had been nine months, and there was no end in sight. They were living something of an ascetic, cenobitic life – in a hotel room, out of suitcases, while their homes and businesses, their lives’ work, were being pulverized. Their life plans, education, all upended indefinitely. How are they possibly coping?
The man stopped, looked down. “Yes, it is not easy, you are right.” Then looked up, and with a gleam in his eye, gestured to the window toward the old city, and intoned “but… to be in Yerushalayim!”
They had crossed over.
[1] I am indebted to Prof. Daniel J. Lasker for sharing this translation with me before publication.
[2] Thanks to Professor Shulamit Elizur for her gracious input regarding some source citations, Professor Daniel Lasker for sharing source materials, and my daughter Rivka for her comments and corrections on an earlier draft.
[3] Shaul Magid, The Necessity of Exile: Essays from a Distance (Ayin Press, 2023).
[4] Haym Soloveitchik, “Rupture and Reconstruction: The transformation of Contemporary Orthodoxy.” Tradition: A Journal of Orthodox Jewish Thought 28:4 (1994), 64-130.
[5] Shalom Rosenberg, “Exile and Redemption in Jewish Thought in the Sixteenth Century: Contemporary Conceptions,” in Jewish Thought in the Sixteenth Century, ed. Bernard Dov Cooperman (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Center for Jewish Studies, 1983), 399-430.
[6] Shalom Carmy, “A View from the Fleshpots: Exploratory Remarks on Gilded Galut Existence,” in Israel as a Religious Reality, ed. Chaim Isaac Waxman (Northvale, New Jersey: Jason Aronson, 1994), p. 1-42.
[7] Speculations abounded regarding the 256th 19-year metonic cycle from creation, which coincided with the turn of that century, since Jeremiah 31:6 – a prophecy predicting the Jewish redemption – opens with the word ranu (the gematric equivalent of 256).
[8] Arie Morgenstern, “Dispersion and the Longing for Zion, 1240-1840,” Azure (2002), 71-132.
[9] Steven Bowman, “Messianic Expectations in the Peloponnesos,” Hebrew Union College Annual (1981), 195-202.
[10] David Singer, “The Rebbe, the Messiah and the Heresy Hunter,” First Things (May 2003).
[11] David Shatz, From the Depths I Have Called to You: Jewish Reflections on September 11th and Contemporary Terrorism (Yeshiva University, 2002).
[12] Marcin Wysocki, “The Eschatological Aspects of the Monastic Life in St. Jerome’s Letters.” Vox Patrum 76 (2020), 143-155.
[13] Jewish, Karaite and Muslim sources report that Byzantine women would send menstrual cloths to Jerusalem to be discarded on the Temple mount. See Moshe Gil, A History of Palestine, 634-1099 (Cambridge University Press, 1997), 67.
[14] Shulamit Elizur. “Exile on Native Soil” (Heb). Jerusalem Studies in Hebrew Literature 27 (2014), 21–36.
[15] Daniel Kenneth Reynolds, Monasticism and Christian Pilgrimage in early Islamic Palestine c. 614-c. 950 (Diss. University of Birmingham, 2014).
[16] Rick Bonnie, “A Sustained Presence: Synagogue Buildings in Galilee during the Early Islamic Period and Later.” Journal of Eastern Mediterranean Archaeology and Heritage Studies 9:3 (2021), 278-298.
[17] Piotr Makowski, “Liturgy after an earthquake. The reduction of sacral space of churches in the cities of Jund al-Urdunn.” Ex Oriente Lux: Studies in Honour of Jolanta Młynarczyk (Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego, 2020), 363-372.
[18] Katherine Allen Smith, War and the making of medieval monastic culture (Boydell & Brewer Ltd, 2013).
[19] See, e.g., Lennart Lehmhaus, “Talmudic Torment: Late Antique Jewish Texts on Pain and Suffering Between Medicine, Martyrdom, and Askesis.” Journal of Early Christian History 12:1 (2022), 52-79.
[20] Solomon A. Nigosian, “Zoroastrian perception of ascetic culture.” Journal of Asian and African studies 34:1 (1999), 4-18.
[21] See Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, “‘Let Me See That Good Land:’ the Story of a Human Life,” in Lewis Aron and Libby Henik, eds., Answering a Question with a Question: Contemporary Psychoanalysis and Jewish Thought (Academic Studies Press, 2010), 236-264.
[22] Oded Yisraeli, ““Taking Precedence over the Torah”: Vows and Oaths, Abstinence and Celibacy in Naḥmanides’s Oeuvre,” The Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 28:2 (2020), 121-150; idem., “Jerusalem in Naḥmanides’s Religious Thought: The Evolution of the “Prayer over the Ruins of Jerusalem”,” AJS Review 41:2 (2017), 409-453.
[23] Uri Zvi Shachar, A pious belligerence: dialogical warfare and the rhetoric of righteousness in the crusading Near East (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021.), 97-129.
[24] Eyal Davidson, “The Advantage of Burial in Safed: Analysis of Medieval Sources,” Conference Lecture, August 8, 2023, archived at https://youtu.be/yQuVKr-ZfD0?si=ZXLsTkYhC8L60knJ and accessed on November 27, 2024.
[25] Avraham Rami Reiner, “Ashkenaz and France in the Middle Ages–were they one cultural entity? R. Hayim Ha-Kohen as a test case.” Journal of Jewish Studies 69:2 (2018), 303-318.
[26] Israel M. Ta Shma, Studies in Medieval Rabbinic Literature: 1. Germany (Bialik Institute, 2004), 254-260; Elhanan Reiner, Pilgrims and Pilgrimage to Eretz Israel, 1099–1517 (Hebrew) (Ph.D. thesis, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1988), 99-114.
[27] Jeffrey R. Woolf, The Fabric of Religious Life in Medieval Ashkenaz (1000-1300): Creating Sacred Communities (Brill, 2015), 22-79.
[28] Aviezer Ravitzky, “The land of Israel: Desire and dread in Jewish literature,” in Hearing visions and seeing voices: Psychological aspects of biblical concepts and personalities (Springer Netherlands, 2006), 153-168.
[29] Jonathan Sarna, “A Projection of America as it Ought to Be: Zion in the Mind’s Eye of American Jews,” in Envisioning Israel: The Changing Ideals and Images of North American Jews, Allon Gal, ed. (Wayne State University Press, 1996), 41-59.
[30] Yaacov Yadgar, and Noam Hadad. “Nation-Statist Soteriology and Traditions of Defeat: Religious-Zionism, the Ninth of Av, and Jerusalem Day,” Politics and Religion 15:3 (2022), 506-525.
[31] Tomer Persico, “The end point of Zionism: Ethnocentrism and the Temple Mount,” Israel Studies Review 32:1 (2017), 104-122.
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