Opposition, Non-Alignment and an Earlier Reform Position

Scholarship on religious anti-Zionism, again drawing on Aviezer Ravitzky's comparative study of Jewish religious responses to Zionism, distinguishes several positions this atlas records as separate documented camps. Public, actively organized religious anti-Zionism, expressed through visible protest and public statement, is associated with Satmar Hasidism and a small number of allied communities, distinct from the considerably larger Haredi public that Ravitzky and other scholars describe as non-Zionist rather than anti-Zionist, meaning it does not affirmatively endorse the Zionist project but also does not organize active theological opposition to the State of Israel's existence, a position with its own internal variation across different Haredi communities and institutions.

A separate and chronologically earlier position came from Classical Reform Judaism in Europe and the United States, which held, on universalist theological grounds articulated in its nineteenth and early twentieth century platforms, that Judaism was a religious community rather than a nation, and that Jewish nationalism was in tension with a specifically Reform understanding of Jewish identity and mission, a position the Reform movement substantially revised from the 1930s and 1940s onward.