Jewish National Identity: A Sephardic Perspective
As we experienced the awesome day of Yom HaKippurim, we find ourselves living through a moment in which the very idea of Jewish national return has become the subject of intense debate. Antisemitism and anti-Zionism are increasingly intertwined in the public discourse, while Jews themselves are once again asking fundamental questions about Jewish identity, peoplehood, sovereignty, and the meaning of the Land of Israel. At such a moment, understanding Zionism only through the political categories of modern Europe—or through the events of the twentieth century—leaves something essential unexplored.
There is another history!
Indeed, the Jewish yearning for Zion did not begin with Zionism. Nor did the idea that Jews might actively participate in the restoration of their national life begin with Theodor Herzl. For centuries, Jewish liturgy, halakhah, biblical interpretation, and rabbinic thought preserved an active consciousness of the prophetic promise of return. What changed in the nineteenth century was that certain rabbis began asking a new question: What if the ancient obligation and yearning for return could once again become a practical program?
One of the most remarkable answers came from Rabbi Yehudah Alkalai (1798–1878), the great Balkan ḥakham whose writings form the centerpiece of my newly published volume, Sephardic Zionism: Rabbi Yehudah Alkalai's Goral LaShem & Other Selected Writings.
It is particularly fitting that Goral LaShem opens with the Seʿir la-Azazel, the scapegoat of the Yom Kippur Temple service. Alkalai's choice is revealing. His writings on Jewish national restoration do not emerge from a Judaism that has separated ritual, repentance, prophecy, peoplehood, and history into distinct categories. They emerge from a world in which these elements remain inextricable. The fate of Israel is simultaneously spiritual, communal, historical, and national.
This is the world that Sephardic Zionism seeks to recover.
The term Sephardic Zionism refers here to the religio-political current that emerged within the Ottoman and Mediterranean Sephardic rabbinic world during the nineteenth century. It understood Jewish national restoration as a natural outgrowth of classical Jewish peoplehood, drawing upon biblical prophecy, Sephardic rationalist political thought, Jewish philosophy, Kabbalah, and halakhah alongside the political realities of the modern world. For Alkalai and those around him, Jewish nationhood was not merely a political project to be reconciled with religion. It was an expression of the covenant of Israel itself.
Thus Alkalai could advocate simultaneously for religious fidelity and political organization, for Torah and diplomacy, for traditional Jewish learning and agricultural development, for repentance and practical human initiative. He called for international Jewish representation, land acquisition, agricultural settlement, economic development, Hebrew revival, diplomatic engagement, and ultimately the restoration of Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel—decades before these ideas became associated with Herzl and political Zionism (in fact, planting their earliest seeds).
Yet the purpose of this book is not simply to tell the Sephardic component of the story of proto-Zionism.
Rather, it seeks to recover the unfolding of the project of Jewish national return in its entirety; but also to see that history through a Sephardic lens and from a Sephardic perspective that has too often been overlooked by historians and rabbis alike. The familiar history of proto-Zionism and religious Zionism has frequently been narrated through the intellectual and political movements of Central and Eastern Europe. The Ottoman-Sephardic world was not merely a peripheral participant in that story. It was developing its own conversation, often earlier, and according to categories that do not fit neatly within the later European distinctions between “religious” and “secular” Zionism.
The result is a different way of seeing a familiar history.
In this volume, Alkalai does not appear in isolation. Through the first comprehensive annotated English translation of Goral LaShem, together with a selection of his writings, readers encounter the remarkable network surrounding him: rabbis such as R. Dr. Yehudah Bibas and R. Haim David Hazan; figures such as Sir Moses Montefiore; philanthropists, diplomats, educators, communal leaders, and the institutions and agricultural pioneers who gradually transformed the idea of return into practical reality.
Extensive historical introductions, translated approbations, biographies, maps, timelines, and hundreds of explanatory notes allow readers to encounter this history not merely as an abstract narrative, but as it unfolded: through sermons, letters, theological debates, political proposals, public controversies, and practical initiatives spanning more than half a century.
For Sephardim, this recovery is more than an exercise in historical correction. It is an opportunity to rediscover a mode of being Jewish in which covenant, Torah, Israel, Zion, polity, and collective destiny form an integrated whole.
And perhaps there is no better time to rediscover that voice.
As we stand before Yom HaKippurim, when Jewish liturgy turns our attention simultaneously toward repentance, responsibility, covenant, and redemption, Alkalai's nineteenth-century question acquires renewed urgency: What does it mean for a people to take responsibility for its own teshuvah—return?
Sephardic Zionism invites us to reconsider that question—not only as history, but as a living part of the Jewish conversation and the meaning of our own national identity.
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