Judah Alkalai

Judah ben Solomon Chai Alkalai (1798 – October 1878) was a Sephardic Jewish rabbi, and one of the influential precursors of modern Zionism along with the Prussian Rabbi Zvi Hirsch Kalischer. It is important to notice that he, as a Sephardic Jew, played such an important role in a process widely attributed to the Ashkenazi Jews.

Alkalai became noted through his advocacy in favor of the restoration of the Jews to the Land of Israel. By reason of some of his projects, he may justly be regarded as one of the precursors of the modern Zionists such as Theodor Herzl.

Alkalai was born in Sarajevo in 1798. At that time Bosnia was ruled by the Ottoman Empire.

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

In 1825 he became reader and teacher at the Sephardic community of Semlin, and then its rabbi a few years later. Semlin, today's Zemun district of the Serbian capital Belgrade, was at that time part of the Austrian Empire's Military Frontier. At the time of Alkalai's arrival, the region was experiencing strong nationalist movements, and the Serbian War of Independence, which lead to the creation of a new Serbian state after centuries of Ottoman occupation, gave impetus to new nationalistic ideas among Balkan Jews such as Alkalai.

Theodor Herzl's paternal grandfather, Simon Loeb Herzl, reportedly attended Alkalai's synagogue in Semlin and the two frequently visited. Grandfather Simon Loeb Herzl "had his hands on" one of the first copies of Alkalai's 1857 work prescribing the "return of the Jews to the Holy Land and renewed glory of Jerusalem." Contemporary scholars conclude that Herzl's own implementation of modem Zionism was undoubtedly influenced by that relationship.

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