No, Christians did not invent Zionism

First published on my Substack, 23 October 2026.

What is it with anti-Zionist Jews claiming that Christians invented Zionism? The image above is from the beginning of a video by Zachary Foster where he makes the bold claim that "Zionism was a Christian idea". He begins his story in the 1640s, saying "In the 1640s, you had this movement founded in England known as the Restorationist movement."

His post got some pushback, which he describes here:

Many comments on this video go something like this:

"Another attempt to absolve them of their crimes"

"You are diminishing Jewish Zionism and its actions"

"hasbara propaganda"

He responds: "The 17th century Christian origins of Zionism have absolutely 0 political implications today. Doesn't make Israel less genocidal. Doesn't have an impact on the ICC arrest warrants for Netanyahu or Gallant. Doesn't make Israel any less of an apartheid state. Doesn't make Zionism any less racist or settler-colonialist. Doesn't absolve Jewish institutions today of their complicit in apartheid and genocide. It's just a curios [sic] point of history."

It may be curious, but it's also wrong. His argument echoes that of Ilan Pappé who, in his book Lobbying for Zionism, claimed the key figure in the invention of Zionism was Lord Shaftesbury in about 1839. Pappé was wrong about that, as I showed in my review of his book. Unfortunately, even though Foster manages to go back two hundred years further than Pappé, he is still incorrect.

Below is a (non-exhaustive) list of significant moments in the building of Jewish settlements in Palestine from 1211 to 1890, the year in which Nathan Birnbaum coined the term Zionism in his journal Selbstemanzipation, seven years before the First Zionist Congress in 1897. As one can see from the list, the development of settlements in Safed and Hebron long predated the 1640s. So the idea that Jews got the idea from Christians after the 1640s is false. Let's start with an event celebrated in Zionist historiography, some four centuries before the 1640s.

1211 – The "Aliyah of the 300 Rabbis" – A notable group of hundreds of European rabbis was predominantly French-Ashkenazi and Provençal, though some sources say there were also English participants: the 16th-century chronicler Solomon ibn Verga wrote that "the Rabbis of France and England" went to Jerusalem, "more than three hundred" of them. Historians call this wave the Aliyah of the Tosafists. The key figures in this group, such as Rabbi Samson of Sens, were the leading giants of northern French and Rhenish (German) Jewish scholarship. While others came from Provence (southern France), and the Spanish scholar Nahmanides (also known as Ramban) followed half a century later, arriving in Acre in the summer of 1267, the linguistic and cultural core of that 1211 wave was French-Ashkenazi.

The fate of the Judeans

They settled in Jerusalem, which had been recaptured by Saladin in 1187. The 300 were, thus, among the first Jews to live in Jerusalem for more than a century after they had been banished in 1099 by the Crusaders. It's worth noting that these Ashkenazi settlers had no connection to the ancient Judeans who had existed in "Judea" more than a millennium before. What's more, it is suggested by Israeli academic Paul Wexler that the Jewish population before the 300 Rabbis arrived was not the original biblical Judeans either. Wexler, emeritus Professor of Linguistics at Tel Aviv University, argues that most Jewish groups, the Ashkenazim and Sephardim, including the Musta'arabim (Arab or Arabic-speaking Jews), are primarily the descendants of non-Jewish populations. We can note that the term Musta'arabim is preferable to, and older than, the propaganda term adopted by the Zionists to refer to supposedly "indigenous" Jews who spoke Arabic: the "Mizrahim". The term came to prominence as a classification only after the creation of the Zionist colony and referred to "Eastern" or "Arab" Jews, though it included incoming settler colonists who spoke a variety of languages and were not all "Arab", including Jews from Iraq, Morocco, Yemen, Iran, or Syria.

In the case of the Musta'arabim and other Arabic-speaking Jews, Wexler argues that they descend largely from Arab, Berber and other West Asian and North African converts to Judaism in the centuries up to about 1200 AD. Long before then, Hebrew had ceased to be a living language. The older view, which is still reflected in standard reference works, was that Aramaic began to supplant Hebrew as early as the 3rd or 4th century BC. The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls overturned that view. After this the consensus became that Hebrew ceased to be spoken around the beginning of the third century AD, a few generations after the Bar Kokhba Revolt (132–135 AD, i.e. in the second century), in which the Judeans were defeated. Estimates differ, but it is generally agreed that Hebrew died out as a native tongue between the second and fourth centuries. Effectively then, on this account, the remaining "Judeans" were either killed or exiled and integrated into other populations.

Those Jews that later spoke Arabic were – says Wexler – converts who "relexified" Arabic with Hebrew words, as opposed to having switched from Hebrew to an Arabic form of the language. In his 1996 book, The Non-Jewish Origins of the Sephardic Jews, Wexler claims that Sephardic and North African/Middle Eastern Jewish communities are largely composed of converted Berbers and Arabs. He views the term Musta'arabi ("Arabised") literally, suggesting an ethnic Arab substrate that took on a Jewish religious identity, rather than ethnically Judean populations taking on the Arabic language. So, by the time that Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews came to settle in the Levant and replace or overwhelm the "Arab Jews", there had been very few or – most likely – no "Judeans" living in the territory for perhaps a millennium.

Safed – the first major Jewish settlements in the Levant

Phase 1: The Medieval Trickle (Pre-1492)

Long before the mass expulsions from Spain and Portugal in the 1490s, individual Sephardic scholars, merchants, and pilgrims also made their way to Palestine.

1488 – The Arrival of Rabbi Obadiah of Bertinoro – This famous Italian commentator on the Mishnah arrived in Jerusalem shortly before Passover 1488, and his letters home describe the Jewish communities he found. Safed already had a functioning Jewish community, numbering some 300 families in 1481, and in Bertinoro's time, as an Ashkenazi writer recorded a generation later, "the prayers were said according to the rite of the Mustarabim". Naturally Zionists see the Musta'arabi as the living link to the biblical Israelites or Judeans at the time of Jesus. But even that tenuous connection is disputed, as we have seen.

Phase 2: The Great Influx (1492–1516)

The definitive arrival of the Sephardim as the dominant cultural force was triggered directly by the Spanish Expulsion of 1492, followed by the expulsions and forced conversions in Portugal in 1496–97.

1492–1498 (The First Wave): Tens of thousands of Jews were expelled from the Iberian Peninsula. Many fled to North Africa, Italy or the Ottoman Empire; relatively few at first entered the territories of the Mamluk Sultanate, which controlled Palestine at the time and was "quite inhospitable" to them. Even so, Spanish refugees began arriving in Safed towards the end of Mamluk rule, and the town, with its cooler climate, became a magnet for these refugees.

Before 1492, the tiny existing population of Safed and Hebron consisted of Musta'arabi Jews (Arabic-speaking Jews who had lived in West Asia and beyond for some centuries). Because the Iberian influx was so massive, the Sephardim culturally overwhelmed the existing Musta'arabi population and absorbed it into the Sephardic umbrella, something the small trickle of Ashkenazim could not have done. Within a generation, one observer noted, the Sephardim had "practically eliminated every other usage". Even the genocidal Chabad cult agrees that the Arabic-speaking Jews were "overshadowed by and merged into" the Sephardim, effectively wiping out any claim that any of the Jews in the contemporary state of Israel are indigenous to the Levant.

So what did these Jews actually speak? Not Hebrew, which had long survived only as a liturgical and literary language, and not Aramaic, which had replaced it in Palestine but lasted only until the seventh century. After the Arab conquest the Jews of the region adopted Arabic, keeping only their religion and their alphabet: the Musta'arabim spoke Judeo-Arabic, their own Arabic written in Hebrew letters. Aramaic lived on only on the page, in the Talmud and in the Zohar, the classic text of Jewish mysticism, which was written in Aramaic long after anyone spoke it.

After 1492 that changed too. In the towns the Musta'arabim gradually adopted Judeo-Spanish along with the rest of Sephardic culture, though for some decades the Jews of the countryside remained Arabic speakers. Judeo-Spanish, also called Ladino or Judezmo, is at base Old Castilian written in Hebrew characters: the language of Toledo, not of Judea. (The claim that "Ladino" properly means only the language of Bible translations and prayers is one the Encyclopaedia Judaica finds "hardly tenable".) Yiddish, the language of the Ashkenazim, came later and in smaller numbers: at the start of the 18th century only a few hundred Ashkenazim lived in the whole country, and Menachem Mendel's party of 1777 were, in Michael Freund's words, "Yiddish-speaking immigrants".

1516 (The Ottoman Conquest): The Ottoman Empire conquered Palestine from the Mamluks, and the Sephardi element in Safed increased further. Ottoman rule was far more welcoming, and Safed experienced a massive boom in the 16th century: Turkish tax records show some 48 European families there in 1525, and 143 Portuguese-Jewish and 324 Spanish-Jewish households by 1555. While overwhelmingly Sephardic, the town also drew Ashkenazi scholars, who arrived to collaborate, publish, and practise, and in time formed a community of their own.

1522 (The Report of Rabbi Moses Basola): Rabbi Moses Basola visited Safed and found 300 Jewish families, made up of Sephardim, Musta'arabim, and Jews from the Maghreb.

1524 (The Leadership of Rabbi Jacob Berab): By this year Rabbi Jacob Berab, an eminent Spanish exile born near Toledo, was living in Safed, at least for periods. He became its leading rabbi and in 1538 tried to renew rabbinical ordination, cementing Sephardic administrative and halakhic (legal) dominance over the city just as the first small groups of Ashkenazim began trickling in.

1520s–1530s (Initial Influx): Small groups of Ashkenazi Jews arrived and, alongside the existing Sephardic (Spanish-descent) Jews, emerged as a distinct group among the Jews of Safed, later with their own congregation.

1550s (Scholarly Prominence): Renowned figures, including Rabbi Moses Alshech (a biblical commentator born in Adrianople to a Sephardic family, who studied under Joseph Caro and later sat on Caro's court in Safed), became cornerstones of Safed's legal and spiritual institutions.

1570 (The Lurianic Kabbalah Revolution): Rabbi Isaac Luria (known as the Ari), who was born in Jerusalem to an Ashkenazi father and a Sephardic mother, moved to Safed in 1569 or early 1570. Over a brief period before his death in 1572, his teachings revolutionised Jewish mysticism globally. He bridged both heritages and reshaped the liturgical customs of European Jewry: the Hasidic prayer rite, according to Chabad, follows his custom.

1577 (Printing in Safed): Eliezer ben Isaac Ashkenazi and his son Isaac of Prague left Lublin in 1573 and, after three years in Constantinople, set up a Hebrew printing press in Safed, issuing three books between 1577 and 1580. This technology helped carry Safed's spiritual texts – including the works of Sephardic and Ashkenazi rabbis alike – to the global diaspora: the rapid spread of mysticism from Safed has been attributed to Hebrew printing in the Ottoman Empire.

Early 1600s (Institutional Growth): At the beginning of the 17th century Safed had 21 synagogues, 18 schools and 300 rabbinical scholars, and its community was split into four congregations: Ashkenazim, Portuguese Jews, Provençal Jews, and Italians. One of the synagogues associated with Luria, still known as the Ari Ashkenazi Synagogue, belongs to the Ashkenazim.

1740s–1770s (The Decline and Shift): An epidemic (1747) and a devastating earthquake (1759), which killed 2,000 people, among them 190 Jews, severely crippled the town; by 1764 only 50 Sephardi families remained. However, the community was revitalised from 1777 with the arrival of Ashkenazi Hasidic pioneers led by Menahem Mendel of Vitebsk.

Hebron: The Spanish Enclave Absorbs European Immigrants

Unlike Safed's rapid expansion, Hebron was a smaller, more tightly knit community. Its Jewish Quarter was structurally re-founded in 1540, by the traditional dating, when Rabbi Malkiel Ashkenazi settled in the town and bought the walled courtyard in which Hebron's Jews lived, although he is recorded as dying around 1620. He led a group of Sephardic Jews there and founded the Avraham Avinu Synagogue, the town's oldest.

1540s–1590s (The Sephardic Foundation): The community was tiny: the Ottoman tax registers recorded no more than 20 Jewish households. It was consolidated around a single walled courtyard and the Avraham Avinu Synagogue, while Spanish exiles increasingly shaped its spiritual leadership. Malkiel Ashkenazi served as Hebron's first rabbi, and the community treated his legal decisions and customs as binding for generations. Late in the century, kabbalists from Safed, including Elijah de Vidas, moved to the town.

1600s (Kabbalah and Amsterdam Money): Lurianic kabbalah and asceticism shaped Hebron's religious life, and the Prague-born kabbalist Isaiah Horowitz, who led Jerusalem's Ashkenazi community from 1621, recorded the customs of Hebron as laid down by Malkiel Ashkenazi. In 1659 the Amsterdam philanthropist Abraham Pereira established the yeshivah Hesed le-Avraham there, and distinguished rabbis lived in the town.

1700 – The Aliyah of Judah He-Hasid: A large group of Ashkenazi Jews from Europe, reportedly some 1,300 of whom about 500 died en route, set out with Rabbi Judah He-Hasid for Jerusalem, intending to settle there. He arrived on 14 October 1700 and died a few days later; several hundred of his followers reached the city.

1720s–1740s (Ashkenazi Newcomers): Hebron's Jewish population rose somewhat after the breakdown of Jerusalem's Jewish settlement in 1721, and with the arrival of Abraham Gershon of Kutow, the Baal Shem Tov's brother-in-law, who visited in 1748. He related that the single Jewish courtyard was so crowded that his family could not join him there.

1738 (The Avraham Avinu Restoration): As the shared community expanded, the Avraham Avinu synagogue was restored; it was enlarged again in 1864.

1740s–1760s (Socio-Economic Collaboration): Hebron had sent emissaries of its own since the middle of the 17th century, and its emissaries (shadarim) now toured Europe. Between 1753 and 1758, for example, Rabbi Hayyim Joseph David Azulai toured Italy, Germany, Holland, France and England as emissary of the Hebron yeshivah. These emissaries raised charitable funds (Halukkah) to sustain the poor back in Hebron.

1770s (Pre-Modern Transition): By the late 18th century, the foundational groundwork was complete. This set the stage for the early 19th century, when, according to Chabad, a group of Chabad Hasidim founded Hebron's Ashkenazi community.

After the 1760s many further settlement ventures were undertaken.

1777 – Menachem Mendel of Vitebsk: Led, with Avraham of Kalisk and Yisrael of Polotsk, a group of about 300 people, only some of them Hasidim, to the Land of Israel, aiming to establish a religious community, which was a significant precursor to organised settlement.

1788 – The Alter Rebbe (Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi): While he remained in Europe to lead the Chabad movement, he was a fierce supporter of those who moved. He established a permanent fundraising system to support the settlers, which eventually evolved into the Colel Chabad (est. 1788), the oldest continuously operating charity in occupied Palestine. He was the author of the Jewish supremacist "bible" of the genocidal Chabad cult, the Tanya.

1816 or the 1820s – The Mitteler Rebbe (Rabbi Dovber Schneuri) – Accounts differ on when the second leader of Chabad sent his followers to Hebron. The Jewish community of Hebron traces Chabad's roots there to 1816–1823, when a wave of Hasidim moved from Safed at his behest, and Steve Rodan's Times of Israel blog dates Chabad's arrival to 1816, when Hasidim directed by Dovber Schneuri relocated from Safed. Chabad's own historian, Shalom Dov Ber Levin, records instead that the families who came in 1816–17 settled in Safed, Tiberias and Jerusalem, and that the Mitteler Rebbe directed them to Hebron in 1821–23, the move taking place between 1821 and 1826. Chabad's world headquarters dates its history in the city to 1823.

1838 – Moritz Steinschneider – In 1838, along with two lifelong friends, Albert Löwy and Abraham Benisch, he set up a secret society among students at Vienna, called Die Einheit, to encourage Jewish colonisation in Palestine. Some two decades later, in 1860, Steinschneider coined the term "antisemitic", mistakenly imagining that the scholar he was referring to thought Ashkenazi Jews were Semites and that he was a Judeosceptic. In reality he was a Judeophile. His two friends went on to play significant roles in the founding of the Zionist movement. Benisch later became the editor of the Jewish Chronicle. Together Benisch and Löwy founded and ran the Anglo-Jewish Association which bought them into contact with the largesse of the Rothschild family.

1839 – Rabbi Yehuda Alkalai published Darkhei No'am, a Hebrew grammar in whose introduction he called on Jews to prepare for redemption through devotion to Zion and material support for those already living in the Land of Israel. He developed these ideas in Shelom Yerushalayim (1840) and Minhat Yehuda (1843), arguing that the physical return of the Jews to Zion must precede the messianic redemption.

1840s – After the 1840 Damascus affair Alkalai's writing grew more urgent, and a society he founded in Zemun for the Jewish return to the Land of Israel was active in several of Serbia's Jewish communities.

1852 – Alkalai established the Society for the Settlement of Eretz Yisrael in London during a tour of Western Europe. While the society was short-lived and disbanded shortly after its creation, it served as a platform for Alkalai to publish his pamphlet, Mevaser Tov (Harbinger of Good Tidings), which called for an organised Jewish association to promote the "regaining of their fatherland".

1860 – Association for the Colonisation of Palestine (Kolonisations-Verein für Palästina) – Alkalai was an active member of this group, established by Chaim Lorje in Frankfurt an der Oder. He worked alongside Rabbi Zvi Hirsch Kalischer to promote agricultural settlement in Palestine.

1860 – Sir Moses Montefiore (1784–1885): A British philanthropist who visited the "Holy Land" seven times (as far back as 1827), backing agricultural settlement and building residential areas in Jerusalem, such as Mishkenot Sha'ananim in 1860.

1871 – Kol Israel Haverim: On a visit to the Land of Israel, Alkalai founded this society for the settlement of "Eretz Yisrael". He gave it the same name as the Hebrew translation of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, in an attempt to create a local branch dedicated to settlement. He settled in Jerusalem himself in 1874.

All of this happened before the invention of the term "Zionism". So, the next time you hear someone – Zionist or anti-Zionist – talk about the Christian origins of Zionism, feel free to disabuse them of this fanciful notion.

What is it with anti-Zionist Jews claiming that Christians invented Zionism? The image above is from the beginning of a reel by Zachary Foster where he makes the bold claim that Zionism was a Christian idea. He begins his story in 1640, saying "In the 1940s you had this movement founded in England known as the Restorationist movement."

His post got some pushback which he describes here:

Many comments on this video go something like this:

• "Another attempt to absolve them of their crimes"

• "You are diminishing Jewish Zionism and its actions"

• "hasbara propaganda"

He responds: "The 17th century Christian origins of Zionism have absolutely 0 political implications today. Doesn't make Israel less genocidal. Doesn't have an impact on the ICC arrest warrants for Netanyahu or Gallant. Doesn't make Israel any less of an apartheid state. Doesn't make Zionism any less racist or settler-colonialist. Doesn't absolve Jewish institutions today of their complicit in apartheid and genocide. It's just a curious point of history."

It may be curious, but it's also wrong. His argument echoes that of Ilan Pappé who, in his Lobbying for Zionism, claimed the key figure in the invention of Zionism was Lord Shaftesbury in about 1839. Pappé was wrong about that, as I showed in my review of his book. Unfortunately, even though Foster manages to go back two hundred years further than Pappé, he is still incorrect.

Below is a (non-exhaustive) list of significant moments in the building of Jewish settlements in Palestine from 1200-1885 the year in which Nathan Birnbaum invented the term Zionism, prior to the First Zionist Congress in 1897. As one can see from the list, the development of settlements in Safed and Hebron long predated 1640. So the idea that Jews got the idea from Christians after 1640, is false. Let's start with an event celebrated in Zionist historiography, some four centuries before 1640.

1211 - The "Aliyah of the 300 Rabbis" - A notable group of hundreds of European rabbis— was predominantly French-Ashkenazi and Provencal, though some sources say there were also English participants. Historians call this wave the Aliyah of the Tosafists. The key figures in this group, such as Rabbi Samson of Sens, were the leading giants of northern French and Rhenish (German) Jewish scholarship. While it included scholars from Provence (southern France), and a small number of scholars from Christian Spain like Nahmanides (also known as Ramban, who arrived slightly later in 1267), the linguistic and cultural core of that 1211 wave was French-Ashkenazi.

The fate of the Judeans

They settled in Jerusalem which had been recaptured by Saladin in 1197. The 300 were, thus, among the first Jews to live in Jerusalem for more than a century after they had been banished in 1099 by the Crusaders. It's worth noting that these Ashkenazi settlers had no connection to the ancient Judeans who had existed in "Judea" more than a millennia before. What's more it is suggested by Israeli academic Paul Wexler that the Jewish population before the 300 Rabbis arrived was not the original biblical Judeans either. Wexler, emeritus Professor in Linguistics at Tel Aviv University, argues that most Jewish groups, the Ashkenazim and Sephardim, including the Musta'arabim (Arab or Arabic speaking Jews), are primarily the descendants of non-Jewish populations. We can note that the term Musta'arabim is preferable and older than the propaganda term invented by the Zionists to refer to supposedly 'indigenous" Jews who spoke Arabic: the "Misrahim". This term was invented after the creation of the Zionist colony and referred to "Eastern" or "Arab" Jews though it included incoming settler colonists who spoke a variety of languages and were not all "Arab" including Jews from Iraq, Morocco, Yemen, Iran, or Syria.

In the case of the Musta'arabim - specifically indigenous Semitic Arabs/Aramaeans in the Levant - Wexler argues they converted to Judaism during the Roman, Byzantine, and early Islamic eras. It was during this period that Hebrew ceased to be a living language. The generally agreed period when this happened was in the 4th Century BC, until the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. After this the consensus became that Hebrew was lost as a native language shortly after the Bar Kokhba Revolt (132-136AD/CE, ie in the Second Century) where the Judeans/Jews were defeated. Estimate differ but it is generally agreed that Hebrew died out as a native tongue between the Second and Fourth centuries. Effectively then, the remaining "Judeans" were either killed or exiled and integrated into other populations.

Those Jews that later spoke Arabic were - says Wexler - converts who "relexified" Arabic with Hebrew words as opposed to having switched from Hebrew to an Arabic form of the language. In his 1996 book, The Non-Jewish Origins of the Sephardic Jews, Wexler claims that Sephardic and North African/Middle Eastern Jewish communities are largely composed of converted Berbers and Arabs. He views the term Musta'arabi ("Arabised") literally, suggesting an ethnic Arab substrate that took on a Jewish religious identity, rather than ethnically Judean populations taking on the Arabic language. So, by the time that Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews came to settle in the Levant and replace or overwhelm the "Arab Jews" there had been very few or - most likely - no "Judeans" living in the territory for perhaps a millennium.

Safed -the first major Jewish settlements in the Levant

Phase 1: The Medieval Trickle (Pre-1492)

Long before the mass expulsions from Spain and Portugal in the 1490s, individual Sephardic scholars, merchants, and pilgrims also made their way to Palestine.

1488 - The Arrival of Rabbi Obadiah of Bertinoro - This famous Italian-Sephardic commentator arrived in Jerusalem. His detailed letters home describe the existing Jewish communities. He noted that Safed already had a small, functioning Jewish community composed of Arabic-speaking Jews (Musta'arabi) and a handful of Sephardic families who had integrated into the local textile trades. Naturally Zionists see the Musta'arabi as the living link to the biblical Israelites or Judeans at the time of Jesus. But even that tenuous connection is disputed as we have seen.

Phase 2: The Great Influx (1492–1516)

The definitive arrival of the Sephardim as the dominant cultural force was triggered directly by the Spanish Expulsion of 1492, followed by the Portuguese Expulsion of 1497.

• 1492–1498 (The First Wave): Tens of thousands of Jews were expelled from the Iberian Peninsula. While many fled to North Africa or Italy, a significant contingent moved directly into the territories of the Mamluk Sultanate, which controlled Palestine at the time. Safed, with its cooler climate and existing textile trade, became an immediate magnet for these traumatised refugees. They quickly outnumbered the existing "Musta'arabi" Arabic Jews because of their advanced knowledge of European international trade, weaving, and printing techniques.

• Before 1492, the tiny existing population of Safed and Hebron consisted of Musta'arabi Jews (Arabic-speaking Jews who had lived in the West Asia and beyond for some years). Because the 1492 influx of Iberian Sephardim was so massive, they completely culturally overwhelmed and absorbed the then existing Musta'arabi population into the Sephardic umbrella, something a small trickle of Ashkenazim could not have done. [1, 2, 3, 4] Even the genocidal Chabad cult agrees that the Arabic speaking Jews were "overshadowed by and merged into" the Sephardim, effectively wiping out any claim that any of the Jews in the contemporary state of Israel are indigenous to the Levant.

• 1516 (The Ottoman Conquest): The Ottoman Empire conquered Palestine from the Mamluks. Ottoman Sultan Selim I, and later Suleiman the Magnificent, actively welcomed Jewish immigration to boost the empire's economy. This open-door policy caused the Sephardic population in Safed and Hebron to skyrocket.Safed experienced a massive boom in the 16th century following the Ottoman conquest (1516) and the influx of Spanish exiles. While overwhelmingly Sephardic, Ashkenazi scholars arrived continuously to collaborate, publish, and practice. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

• 1522 (The Report of Rabbi Moses Basola): Rabbi Moses Basola visited Safed and documented that the Sephardim had already established three distinct Sephardic synagogues based on their specific regions of origin: the Cordovero congregation (from Córdoba), the Aragon congregation, and the Castile congregation.

• 1524 (The Leadership of Rabbi Jacob Berab): By this year, Rabbi Jacob Berab, an eminent Spanish exile, settled in Safed and became the chief rabbi, cementing Sephardic administrative and halakhic (legal) dominance over the city just as the first small groups of Ashkenazim began trickling in.

• 1520s–1530s (Initial Influx): Small groups of Ashkenazi Jews arrived, integrating into the local manufacturing industries. They established distinct houses of worship alongside existing Sephardic (Spanish-descent) Jews. [1, 2]

• 1550s (Scholarly Prominence): Renowned Ashkenazi figures, including Rabbi Moses Alshech (an Ashkenazi-born biblical commentator who studied under Joseph Caro), became cornerstones of Safed’s legal and spiritual institutions.

• 1570 (The Lurianic Kabbalah Revolution): Rabbi Isaac Luria (known as The Ari), who was born in Jerusalem to an Ashkenazi father and a Sephardic mother, moved to Safed. Over a brief two-year period, his teachings revolutionized Jewish mysticism globally. He bridged both heritages and reshaped the liturgical customs of European Jewry. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

• 1577 (The First Printing Press in West Asia): Eliezer ben Isaac Ashkenazi of Prague and his son Isaac established the region's first Hebrew printing press in Safed. This technology exported Safed's spiritual texts—including the works of Sephardic and Ashkenazi rabbis alike—to the global diaspora. [1, 2, 3, 4]

• 1584 (Institutional Growth): Ottoman tax logs registered 32 active synagogues in Safed. Several of these, such as the historic Ari Ashkenazi Synagogue, catered specifically to the European customs of the Ashkenazi population. [1]

• 1740s–1770s (The Decline and Shift): Plagues (1742) and a devastating earthquake (1769) severely crippled the town, leaving only a handful of families behind. However, the community was revitalized starting in 1777 with the arrival of a massive wave of Ashkenazi Hasidic pioneers. [1, 2]

Hebron: The Spanish Enclave Absorbs European Immigrants

Unlike Safed's rapid expansion, Hebron was a smaller, more tightly knit community. Its Jewish Quarter was structurally re-founded in the 1540s by Sephardic exiles who purchased the land and built the Abraham Avinu Synagogue. [1, 2, 3, 4]

• 1540s–1580s (The Sephardic Foundation): Following the construction of the Jewish Quarter, Hebron operated almost exclusively under Sephardic governance and Judeo-Spanish cultural norms. Ashkenazi presence was limited to nomadic pilgrims and transient scholars.

• 1600s (Individual Integration): Throughout the 17th century, individual Ashkenazi kabbalists and legal experts moved from European centers to Hebron. They chose to adopt the local Sephardic prayer styles and dress code to seamlessly integrate into the single, protected community structure.

• 1700 - The Aliyah of Judah He-Hasid: A large group of approximately 500 to 1,500 Ashkenazi Jews from Europe, led by Rabbi Judah He-Hasid, arrived in Jerusalem to establish a permanent community.

• 1720s (The Avraham Avinu Expansion): As the shared community expanded, historical records document small, permanent groups of Ashkenazi Jews purchasing adjacent living quarters inside the walled compound to house the trickle of European immigrants.

• 1740s–1760s (Socio-Economic Collaboration): Hebron's rabbinate began appointing emissaries (Shalichim) to tour Europe. These emissaries raised charitable funds (Halukkah) specifically to sustain the multi-ethnic poor back in Hebron.

• 1770s (Pre-Modern Transition): By the late 18th century, the foundational multi-ethnic groundwork was complete. This set the stage for the early 19th century, when the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic movementofficially established a formal, independent Ashkenazi organizational presence in Hebron for the very first time. [1, 2, 3, 4]

After the 1760s many further settlement ventures were undertaken.

• **1777 - **Menachem Mendel of Vitebsk: Led a group of over 300 Hasidic followers to the Land of Israel, aiming to establish a religious community, which was a significant precursor to organized settlement.

• 1788 - The Alter Rebbe (Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi): While he remained in Europe to lead the Chabad movement, he was a fierce supporter of those who moved. He established a permanent fundraising system to support the settlers, which eventually evolved into the Colel Chabad (est. 1788), the oldest continuously operating charity in occupied Palestine. He was the author of the Jewish supremacist 'bible' of the genocidal Chabad cult, the Tanya.

• 1816 - The Mitteler Rebbe (Rabbi Dovber Schneuri) - the second leader of Chabad encouraged a group of his followers to settle in Hebron, establishing the first Chabad community there.

• 1834 - Rabbi Yehuda Alkalai published his first proto-Zionist pamphlet, Shema Yisrael ("Hear, O Israel"), which first proposed Jewish settlement as a natural precursor to messianic redemption.

• 1838 -** Morris Steinschneider - I**n 1838, long with two lifelong friends, Albert Löwy and Abraham Benisch, he set up a secret Zionist group at the University of Vienna, called Die Einheit, to encourage Jewish colonisation in Palestine. Some two decades later Steinschneider invented the term Antisemitism, mistakenly imagining that it referred to the Jews.

• 1840s - following the Damascus affair, Alkalai's society in Zemun, Serbia became active, spreading ideas of “national restoration” to other major Jewish communities in Serbia.

• 1852 - Alkalai established the Society for the Settlement of Eretz Yisrael in London during a tour of Western Europe. While the society was short-lived and disbanded shortly after its creation, it served as a platform for Alkalai to publish his pamphlet,  Mevaser Tov (Harbinger of Good Tidings), which called for an organized Jewish association to promote the "regaining of their fatherland".

• 1860 - Association for the Colonisation of Palestine (Kolonisations-Verein für Palästina) - Alkalai was a primary leader and activist, in this group, established by Chaim Lorje in Frankfurt. He worked alongside Rabbi Zvi Hirsch Kalischer to promote agricultural settlement in Palestine.

• 1860 - Sir Moses Montefiore (1784–1885): A British philanthropist who visited the “Holy Land” seven times (back as far at the 1830s), financing agricultural settlements, industry, and building residential areas in Jerusalem, such as Mishkenot Sha'ananim in 1860.

• 1874 - Kol Israel Chaverim: Upon visiting Jerusalem, Alkalai founded this society for the settlement of “Eretz Yisrael”. He gave it the same name as the Hebrew translation for the Alliance Israélite Universelle in an attempt to create a local branch dedicated to settlement and assisting the poor in building up colonial settlements on the land.

All of this happened before the invention of the term “Zionism” by Nathan Birnbaum in 1890. So, the next time you hear someone - Zionist or anti-Zionist - talk about the Christian origins of Zionism, feel free to disabuse them of this fanciful notion.

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