Opposition to Zionism on religious grounds is older than the state and has never disappeared, though it is often left out of general accounts. The best known argument runs from a passage in the Babylonian Talmud, at Ketubot 111a, read as three oaths binding Israel not to ascend to the land as a body, not to rebel against the nations, and binding the nations not to oppress Israel excessively. Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum of Satmar set out the case at length in Va-Yoel Moshe in 1961, and Neturei Karta, formed in Jerusalem in 1938, maintains it publicly. A separate and larger Haredi position, associated with Agudat Israel, was non-Zionist rather than anti-Zionist: it withheld religious legitimacy from the national project while participating in the institutions of the state. Classical Reform Judaism also rejected Jewish nationhood, in the Pittsburgh Platform of 1885, a position the movement reversed in the Columbus Platform of 1937. This entry records the camps and their sources.
Facts
Disputed
Earliest FormulationThe Three Oaths passage in the Babylonian Talmud, tractate Ketubot 111a, is the text the religious case is chiefly argued from. 3 The Babylonian Talmud, tractate Ketubot 111a (Anonymous, multiple authors, 1935 Soncino edition), the text the religious anti-Zionist case is chiefly argued from, sets out the Three Oaths passage: that Israel swore not to ascend the wall by mass return by force, not to rebel against the nations, and that the nations swore not to oppress Israel excessively. Whether the passage is halakhically binding is disputed among rabbinic authorities examining the same aggadic text; religious Zionist writers have answered that it is aggadic rather than legal, that the conditions have lapsed, or that the third oath binding the nations was broken first, while religious anti-Zionist readers take it as a live prohibition. Both readings work from the same passage. Status
Status Within the TraditionA minority position within the tradition 1Tradition: Haredi Judaism Current StatusSourced to the subject's own accountThe classical Reform position of 1885 was reversed by the Columbus Platform of 1937 and is no longer held by the movement. The Hasidic and Haredi positions continue. 2 Origins
Held BySignificant Hasidic and Haredi authorities within Judaism, who hold that establishing a Jewish state before the Messiah's coming oversteps human authority. 1 Learn More
Opposition Argued From Scripture
Religious anti-Zionism names Jewish theological objections to the Zionist movement, distinct from secular or political objections in that they are argued from religious sources rather than from nationalism, assimilation or other non-religious grounds. The most systematically developed religious anti-Zionist position rests on a talmudic passage, in tractate Ketubot, traditionally read as three oaths God imposed on the Jewish people and the nations of the world, including an oath against the Jewish people ascending as a wall, read by proponents of this position as a prohibition on organized, mass return to the Land of Israel before the Messiah, and an oath against rebelling against the nations.
Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum, the leader of Satmar Hasidism, developed this reading most fully in his 1961 work Vayoel Moshe, arguing that Zionism violated the oaths and that a Jewish state established through human political and military effort, before the messianic redemption, was itself a religious transgression rather than a legitimate expression of Jewish national life. Satmar and allied Hasidic communities have maintained this position as an active and organized theological stance rather than a merely historical one.
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.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Belongs to Tradition
Religious anti-Zionism, holding that a Jewish state before the Messiah's coming oversteps human authority, has been the position of significant Hasidic and Haredi authorities within this stream.
Contrasts With
Positions on This Question
Classical Reform anti-nationalism, held until the 1930s: Jews are a religious community and not a nation, and the mission is universal rather than territorial.
Sources
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