An Idea Borrowed from the Church

Fifth in a series on Zionism, Judaism, and why the difference matters. Read the earlier parts here: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

Here is a belief most people would file under "Judaism" without a second thought: God gave the Holy Land to the Jewish people as their national possession — unconditionally, permanently, deed and title — and the modern State of Israel is the rightful claiming of that inheritance.

Ask where that idea comes from, and the obvious answer would seem to be the synagogue.

The actual answer is the church.

Of all the borrowed materials this series has traced — German nationalism, Nietzsche, Russian socialism — this one may be the most surprising, because it's the one piece of Zionism that everyone assumes is Jewish. It isn't. And the difference between what Judaism teaches about the land and what the Zionist movement claims about it is not a fine point of theology. It is the whole dispute.

What Judaism teaches about the land

Start with the tradition itself. The land of Israel matters enormously in Judaism — no honest account can minimize it. Jews have faced Jerusalem in prayer three times a day for two thousand years, and the longing for the land runs through the entire liturgy. But listen to what those prayers actually say, because it isn't what the modern slogan says.

In the traditional framework, the land is not a national homeland the way Italy belongs to Italians. It is closer to a palace — the place where God's presence rests, given to the Jewish people for a purpose: to live a life of holiness within it. And the gift came with conditions attached. The Torah warns repeatedly that the land tolerates no violation of its terms, and that a people who break the covenant will not remain in it.

When exile came, the Jewish tradition did not treat it as a real-estate crime committed by the Romans. It treated it as a judgment. The festival prayer says so in five Hebrew words that every observant Jew has recited for centuries: "Because of our sins we were exiled from our land."

That sentence carries an entire theology. Exile is from God, and so is return. The land was not lost like a wallet, to be reclaimed whenever the owner gets strong enough; it was withdrawn by God, and our tradition holds that it will be restored by God, in His time, in a redeemed world — not seized in advance by a movement of men, and certainly not by men who deny the covenant that the whole arrangement rests on.

This is why the rabbinic giants of Europe opposed Herzl from the first day. Their objection was not that they loved the land less. It was that they understood the terms.

The other reading

Now for the version everyone recognizes — land as permanent national title. That reading has a home, and it is Protestant Christianity.

Beginning in the seventeenth century, certain Protestant movements in England and later America developed a doctrine historians call Restorationism: the belief that the Bible promises the Holy Land to the Jewish people as an everlasting national possession, and that their physical return to it is part of God's plan for the end of days. This reading is based on the words of the Bible alone, without the Oral Tradition through which Judaism has always interpreted its own Scripture — which is precisely how it arrives at an unconditional deed, where Judaism sees a conditional covenant.

By the nineteenth century, evangelical Restorationists were actively campaigning for a Jewish return to Palestine — while most of the world's Jews had no such political program at all. In 1891, an American evangelical named William Blackstone organized a petition asking the United States government to help establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine. That was six years before the First Zionist Congress met. The idea of Jewish statehood as biblical destiny was up and running in Christian circles before Herzl had written a word.

Atheists with a Bible

Then came the Zionists — and here the story turns strange. The founders, as this series has documented from their own statements, did not believe in the Bible as revelation. Yet they needed two things the Christian reading could supply: a claim to the land that sounded ancient and holy, and the support of the Christian world, especially Protestant Britain and America. So they adopted it. The Bible became, in their hands, not the word of God but a national charter — quotable for its territorial promises by men who rejected its Author.

No one embodied this move more openly than Ben-Gurion, who told the world plainly that he could not pray to the God of Scripture and did not believe in Him — yet who, when asked to justify Jewish sovereignty over the land, pointed to that same Scripture and declared: "This is our Mandate."

A promise from a God he denied, read according to an interpretation his own religion never held, deployed as a land deed. The traditional Jew watching this could only marvel.

The Christians, at least, believed the Book they were quoting.

Why this matters

For readers from a Christian background, this history has a practical edge. Support for the State of Israel "because the Bible says the land belongs to the Jews" is a position with a genuine pedigree — but the pedigree is Protestant, not Jewish. It is Restorationist doctrine, and a Christian is free to hold it as a matter of Christian faith. What that position cannot honestly claim is to be standing with Judaism, because Judaism's own teaching about the land — conditional, covenantal, awaiting God rather than preempting Him — points in a different direction, and the communities most devoted to Torah said so when Zionism was born and say so still.

The practical conclusion is the same one every article in this series arrives at from a different road. The state's biblical branding is exactly that — branding. It was chosen by secular men for its usefulness, borrowed from a Christian reading of a Jewish book. Judging Jews by it, or assuming that Jewish faith stands behind every claim made in its name, mistakes the label for the contents. The oldest owners of that Book read it differently, and always have.

Next in the series: the sword — how a people famous for centuries as the least warlike in Europe was deliberately taught to worship the military, and where the teachers got the idea.

Historical background on Restorationism and the Blackstone Memorial is drawn from standard histories of Christian Zionism; Ben-Gurion's statements appear in his Recollections*. Full citations available on request.*