Three Documented Readings

Scholarship on religious Zionism, notably Aviezer Ravitzky's study of messianism and Zionism within Jewish religious radicalism, distinguishes several positions this atlas records as documented camps rather than a single settled reading. A practical, non-messianic current, associated with much of Mizrachi and the pre-state religious Zionist public, supported Jewish return and self-government as a practical and religious good without necessarily reading contemporary events as messianic in a theological sense. A redemptive current, developed from Rav Kook's theology and carried forward institutionally by the yeshiva he founded and the circles associated with it, reads the unfolding return in explicitly messianic terms, as a stage in a divinely directed process of redemption.

A further, more activist current within the redemptive reading emphasizes settlement activity specifically as a religious duty flowing from this theology, a position this atlas records as one documented current within religious Zionism rather than as the whole of the movement, and without adjudicating the contested legal or political questions that activity raises in the present day, which fall outside what this record undertakes to settle.