Pioneers of Religious Zionism describes the lives and philosophies of the most important rabbinical Zionists of the 19th and early-20th centuries: Yehuda ben Shlomo Alkalai, Zvi Hirsch Kalischer, Samuel Mohliver, Jacob Reines, Abraham Isaac Kook, and Judah Leib (Fishman) Maimon. The book describes how these men joined secular Zionists in the struggle for the reestablishment of a Jewish national home-an unusual act for their time-and had to contend with fierce opposition and condemnations from many rabbis in Eastern Europe, who believed that the return of the Jewish people to their ancestral homeland of Israel depended upon the arrival of the Messiah. What emerges from this biographical study is that, in their lives and writings, these rabbis provided the foundation on which modern religious Zionism was built.
