What Is Modern Israel?

Usually, we think of the state of modern Israel, as well as the late nineteenth-century Zionist movement that led to its founding, as a response to anti-Semitism which grew out of cultural and religious Judaism. In"What Is Modern Israel?," however, Yakov M. Rabkin turns this understanding on its head, arguing convincingly that Zionism, far from being a natural development of Judaism, in fact has its historical and theological roots in Protestant Christianity. While most Jewish people viewed Zionism as marginal or even heretical, Christian enthusiasm for the Restoration of the Jews to the Promised Land transformed the traditional Judaic yearning for Return a spiritual concept with a very different meaning into a political project.