ABRAHAM GEIGER AND ABRAHAM ISAAC KOOK:MESSIANISM’S RETURN TO HISTORY

By Eli Kavon

Abraham Geiger and Abraham Isaac Kook seem to share little in common but their first

names and the fact that both men were leading rabbis and theologians in their respective

movements. Geiger, the leading Reform theologian in the 19th century, was a master of

the rational, scientific study of Judaism (Wissenschaft des Judentums), a strong opponent

of Jewish Orthodoxy, and a German patriot to the core. Kook, a traditionalist, was the

moving force and spirit behind Religious Zionism, a mystic who formulated his theology

through the lens of Jewish nationalism and a theologian who stressed the centrality of the

Land of Israel to Jewish thought and life. When Geiger died in Germany in 1874, Kook

was but a boy in a small town in Latvia, known as a prodigy of Jewish learning and

destined to become a great Zionist thinker.

The divergence between these two titans of modern Jewish thought can especially be

seen in their opposite views on the role of the Messiah and the messianic age. For Geiger,

the traditional Jewish idea of a personal messiah was archaic and negated the gains Jews

made through European emancipation. The Reform rabbi saw no need for a descendant of

King David to return the Jewish people to sovereignty in the Land of Israel. If Berlin was

Jerusalem, what need was there for a return to Palestine. Geiger, along with many early

Reform rabbis, envisioned not a personal messiah, but a messianic age of human progress

and universal brotherhood in which the Jews would be the agents of redemption for

mankind. In opposition, Kook took a unique stand in contrast to most anti-Zionist

Orthodox Jews by seeing in Zionism the harbinger of messianism. For the Eastern

European Orthodox rabbi, the socialist pioneers who were settling and building up a

Jewish infrastructure in Palestine—many of whom were actually hostile to religion—

were God’s instruments in propelling the coming redemption of the Jewish people and

humanity.

Yet, I will attempt in this essay to demonstrate that despite the disagreement between

Rabbi Geiger and Rabbi Kook on the nature of the messianic idea, both men were

moving toward the same goal within the framework of modern Judaism. In an epoch

when most Jews had discounted messianism as an active force in Jewish history—

especially after the debacle of failed messiah Shabbetai Zevi in the mid-seventeenth

century—Geiger and Kook revived the messianic ideal and provided it with a relevance

that it had lost due to the failure of messianic activism in history. While I will focus

solely on messianism in early Reform and in twentieth century Religious Zionism, my

goal is to show that modern Jewish thinkers struggled with the issue of the relevance of

Judaism and Jewish faith in the modern world. The messianic idea serves as a litmus test

in this regard. The test is how Judaism can remain a relevant and vital force for thought

and action in the modern epoch. Both Geiger and Kook attempted to make messianism a

force in history by returning it into history, into the realm of the possible. Geiger did so

through the Reform idea of a Jewish “mission” to teach the world ethical monotheism,

while Kook tried to return the messianic epoch to history through the Zionist movement.

Before analyzing the theologies of Geiger and Kook regarding the messianic idea, we

need to explore how the phenomenon of messianism began as a force in history but

eventually was pushed off to a distant eschaton, the “end of history.”

The roots of the Messiah are biblical—we can trace its origin back to God’s promise to

King David that his descendants had been granted an “eternal pact” to rule over

Jerusalem (II Samuel 23:5). Subsequently, both classical prophets (e.g., Isaiah) and

apocalyptic prophets (I am thinking specifically of Daniel) develop the idea of a Davidic

messiah and a messianic age. But only much later in history, when the independent

Hasmonean kingdom fell to the power of Rome in the 1st century BCE, did messianic

activism begin to flourish. While Jesus is the best example of such messianic claimants

during the age of Roman rule over Judea, there were many other failed Jewish messiahs

who seized the mantle to overthrow the foreign yoke of Rome over Jerusalem and usher

in a new age of peace, prosperity, and belief in one God. Whether the first rebellion

against the Roman Empire was messianic in its motivation is a difficult question to

answer. Nevertheless, this rebellion resulted in the Roman destruction of the Second

Temple. Sixty years later, the Jews rebelled again in a war that likely had a messianic

leader in the guise of Simon bar Koziba, known as “Bar Kokhba.” Rabbi Akiva, the

greatest rabbi of his age, recognized Bar Koziba as a messiah who would overthrow the

enemy empire and rebuild the Temple (the name “Bar Kokhba,” is an allusion to a

biblical passage associated with the messiah in rabbinic exegesis). While the rebellion

was successful from 132-135, eventually the Romans brought down their might on Israel

and destroyed the rebels and their supporters. Thus, Rabbi Akiva’s messianic activism

ended in disaster. The utter failure of the rebellion was the beginning of messianism’s

exit from the realm of “real” history and the realm of the possible within human history.

During the Bar Kohkba rebellion, Rabbi Yohanan ben Torta is supposed to have said to

Rabbi Akiva: “Akiva, grass will rise from your cheeks and the son of David will not yet

have come.”1 This was likely the political and theological viewpoint of most of the

rabbinic leadership in Palestine after the failed rebellion. The rabbis did their utmost to

dampen the fervor of messianic activism. To allow further messianic rebellions would

have meant the destruction of the Jewish people. In fact, the rabbis were correct in their

assessment of messianism. They forbade calculation of the coming of the messiah, placed

the coming of messiah in a very distant future, and forbade the building up of a Jewish

State without the direct leadership of a messiah chosen only by God. According to the

Talmud, “The Holy One, blessed be He, has adjured Israel ‘not to ascend the wall.’”2 The

meaning of this warning was clear centuries later to the Ashkenazic exegete Rashi

—“’Not to ascend,” together, by force.” This survival strategy of the rabbis served the

Jewish people well for close to two millennia—Jewish life thrived through

accommodation with non-Jewish authority and allowed Jews to flourish, despite

massacres, inquisitions, and exiles. The failed messianic movements of David Alroy,

Solomon Molcho and David Reuveni, and Shabbetai Zevi, only made the rabbinic

establishment more conservative in its theology of discouraging messianic activism. Of

course—and this was Zionism’s scathing critique of Jewish tradition—the rabbinic

strategy inculcated the Jews with a passivity that prevented them from pursuing their

independent destiny as a people in human history.

1 From Ekha Rabba 2:5—cited by Yael Zerubavel in Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition, p. 50.2 From B.T. Kettubot 111a—cited by Aviezer Ravitzky in Messianism, Zionism, and Jewish Religious Radicalism, p. 14.

While the failure of Shabbetai Zevi as a messiah in 1666 deepened traditional rabbinic

suspicion of messianic activism, events in the Christian world in Europe would chip away

at religious conservatism regarding messisanism. Both Europe’s “semineutral society”3

that produced the likes of Moses Mendelssohn and the later emancipation of French

Jewry in 1790 and 1791 eroded the traditional autonomous structure of Jews in Europe.

The end of Jewish autonomous life in Europe signaled as well the beginning of the end of

a monolithic conservative rabbinic theology regarding the messianic advent. The terms of

Jewish emancipation can be summed up in the words of French revolutionary Count

Stanislas de Clermont-Tonnerre: “The Jews should be denied everything as a nation, but

granted everything as individuals. They must be citizens.”4 If the Jews were now citizens

of the French nation and loyal to that nation as French citizens, how could they hope—

even passively—for a messianic return to Jewish sovereignty in Jerusalem?

In the hundred years following emancipation, Jews would answer this question in a

number of ways. The traditionalists could argue that messianic theology is in the domain

of an eschaton and therefore would not interfere with their loyalty to the state in the “real

time” of human history. The reformers could argue that the traditional messianic idea was

no longer valid and they would adapt that idea to the realities of Jewish life in the realm

of the philosophy of the Enlightenment and the politics of emancipation in the 19th

century Germanic states. The secular Zionists would reject emancipation and traditional

messianism, arguing in favor of self-redemption or “auto-emancipation,” the building up

of a Jewish nation-state in Palestine without the agency of God. Finally, in the spirit of

3 Jacob Katz coined this term in Out of the Ghetto.4 Paul R. Mendes Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz, The Jew in the Modern World: A Documentary History, p.104.

proto-Zionists such as rabbis Judah Alkalai and Zvi Hirsch Kalischer—and later on,

Rabbi A.I. Kook—the Zionist building up of Israel could be seen as the human creation

of a state infrastructure that would herald the coming of the Messiah. While the

traditionalists defend the conservative, passive theology of messianism and the secular

Zionists reject divine redemption totally, it is in the realm of both the Reform and

Religious Zionism that we see an attempt to make the idea of the messiah relevant in the

modern world by establishing the basis of the messianic idea on movements emerging in

the 19th century, thereby returning messianism to the realm of human history. One may

argue that secular Zionism does the same—but I dismiss the attempts to brand Socialist

Zionism and Revisionist Zionism as “secular messianism.” The idea of “auto-

emancipation” excludes God from the landscape of these ideologies and therefore is not

within the realm of theological discussion. Where there is a messianic age or a personal

messiah—there must be God. Otherwise, we are outside the realm of religion and into the

realm of pure politics.

Abraham Geiger is not known primarily as a theologian of the messianic idea. His

reputation is as a leading Reform thinker who excelled in the field of Wissenschaft des

Judentums and as a leader in the struggle for Jews to achieve emancipation in the

Germanic states. Geiger’s connection to the question of messiansm, however, is palpable.

First, Geiger considered Judaism as a religious belief and not as an expression of

nationality. This idea in Geiger’s thought can be seen most clearly in his attitude to the

“Damascus Affair” of 1840. Geiger, in his letters, seems to care little of the fate of the

Jews in Syria who were implicated in the ritual murder of a priest and were imprisoned

and tortured by the local authorities. Since Geiger did not believe the basis of Jewish

identity and fate was that of nationhood, he questioned why he, as a “German of the

Mosaic Faith,” should be concerned with the destiny of Jews in the Middle East. The

Reform theologian rejected attempts by Jewish philanthropists in England and France to

secure the release of the imprisoned Jews. In a November 1840 letter, Geiger writes:

…There is no point now in discussing the Damascus Affair in detail once

again….I merely wish to repeat that, while it is very honorable of these gentlemen

to take up the cause of the persecuted and the oppressed, it is not and has never

been a specifically Jewish question….I would consider even the establishment of

Jewish schools in Syria a much more meritorious goal….The worst thing,

however, about such a type of enthusiasm is that it is being wasted on

unsuccessful ventures, therefore also evaporates very quickly and cannot even be

revived for sound purposes. This is the other side of the coin in an incident such

as this, and it saddens me. That Jews in Prussia may have the chance to become

pharmacists or lawyers is much more important to me than the rescue of all Jews

in Asia and Africa, an undertaking with which I sympathize as a human being.

You may think differently on this subject, but I ask you to believe me that this is

my honest conviction, intimately interwoven with the entire structure of my

intellectual view of things…5

The basis of traditional messianism is that the Jews are a national group—and a religious

faith—even in the Exile outside of Israel. The autonomous structure of the kehilla (in

5 From Abraham Geiger and Liberal Judaism, ed. Max Wiener, pp.89-90.

Ashkenaz) and the aljama (in Spain) reinforced the idea that all Jews, despite their

differences, had a common fate and would eventually be redeemed by God as a people.

Geiger negates the basis of the traditional messianic idea by honestly declaring that he

feels no national connection with the tortured Jews of Damascus. His concern is the

advancement of his fellow Jews in the Germanic states through emancipation. Geiger’s

vision of Judaism in the modern world is one of religion, not nationhood. Therefore, he

and the Reform movement must recalibrate the contours of the messianic idea. If the

Jews are not a nation, they do not need to be redeemed as a nation because their national

allegiance is to the nations in which they are citizens. If “Berlin is Jerusalem,” there is no

need to return to the Jerusalem of messianic yearnings. So, while we do not read much of

Geiger’s theology of the messianic idea, we do know that the movement he leads must

reformulate the idea and adapt it to the reality of a Jew on the brink of emancipation in

Central and Western Europe in the nineteenth century. In that context, the idea of a

personal messiah leading the Jewish nation back to sovereignty in the Land of Israel

makes no sense. It is antithetical to an understanding of Judaism as solely a religious

faith.

Geiger’s connection to the messianic idea of the Reform “mission” to spread “ethical

monotheism” and unite mankind in a brotherhood of peace and progress was also

expressed in the synods of the reforming rabbis that the great theologian organized in the

mid-1840’s. The issue of the messianic idea was dealt with specifically at the Reform

Rabbinical Conference in Frankfurt in 1845. Samuel Holdheim, a leading rabbi of radical

Reform, stated the following in regard to the traditional ideas of a personal messiah and a

return of the Jews to sovereignty in Israel:

The wish to return to Palestine in order to create there a political empire for those

who are still oppressed because of their religion is superfluous. The wish should

rather be for a termination of the oppression, which would improve their lot as it

has improved ours. The wish, moreover, is inadmissible. It turns the messianic

hope from a religious into a secular one, which is gladly given up as soon as the

political situation changes for the better. But messianic hope, truly understood, is

religious. It expresses either a hope for redemption and liberation from spiritual

deprivation and the realization of a Kingdom of God on earth, or for political

restoration of the Mosaic theocracy where Jews could live according to the Law

of Moses. This latter religious hope can be renounced only by those who have a

more sublime conception of Judaism, and who believe that the fulfillment of

Judaism’s mission is not dependent on the establishment of a Jewish State, but

rather by a merging of Jewry into the political constellations of the fatherland.

Only an enlightened conception of religion can displace a dulled one….6

The reformers negate traditional messianism because it runs counter to their patriotism as

loyal, emancipated citizens of the Germanic states and it distorts Judaism’s modern role

as a spiritual religion devoid of any national implications. The Reform movement,

spurred on by Geiger, keeps the messianic idea alive and relevant in modern history. The

reformers do so by changing the messianic ground rules. They do not reject messianism!

6 Mendes Flohr and Reinharz, op cit., p.164.

They reformulate the messianic idea so that Jews living in the Diaspora can carry out the

messianic vision of an enlightened, progressive brotherhood of humanity. Under Geiger,

the Reform movement keeps the messianic idea alive by adapting it to 19th century

European Enlightenment ideas of reason and progress. For the reformers, messianism is

as alive and vital as it is for the Orthodox—perhaps more so because the messianic idea

enters the realm of history and the possible, not part of the traditional, age-old, distant

eschaton.

As Abraham Geiger and the early Reform movement reconcile the messianic idea with

the modern worldview of their place and time, Abraham Isaac Kook does the same but in

a contrasting framework—that of modern, European nationalism and the Zionist

movement. As good German patriots and as thinkers who rejected Jewish identity as

national, the early reformers were fierce critics of Zionism. So for that matter were their

Orthodox opponents, who opposed Zionism because the Zionists were “ascending the

wall” and building up a homeland in Israel without the leadership of God or His chosen

Messiah. The issue of Zionism was the only one that united German Reform rabbis and

their Orthodox counterparts, who together, kept Theodor Herzl and the First Zionist

Congress out of Munich. History remembers these rabbis as the “Protestrabbiner.”7

Rabbi Kook was not the first Jewish theologian to propose the modern settlement of

Israel as a vehicle for the messianic advent. In the mid-19th century, when Abraham

Geiger was at the height of his influence in the Reform movement, both Judah Alkalai in

Serbia and Zvi Hirsch Kalischer in Poland proposed in their rabbinic writings that Jewish

7 Ibid. pp. 427-9.

settlement of Israel be a springboard of the coming of the Messiah. According to the late

Arthur Hertzberg, European national movements that rebelled against the Ottoman and

Russian empires influenced these two traditionalist rabbis to dare suggest that Jews

immigrate en masse to Eretz Yisrael8. Their Orthodox colleagues, for the most part,

rejected Alkalai and Kalischer’s proto-Zionism and these proto-Zionists were soon

forgotten. While traditionalist Jews could be found among the small “Lovers of Zion”

groups in Eastern Europe and, a bit later, among supporters of Herzl’s “Political

Zionism,” it was not until the emergence of Abraham Isaac Kook that Judaism and

Zionism would be synthesized into a larger theology of Jewish—and global—

redemption.

I would not dare to summarize Rabbi Kook’s revolutionary theology in a few paragraphs.

Yet, we can begin to understand Palestine’s first Chief Ashkenazi Rabbi by

understanding that his worldview is as much a daring Jewish revolution as was Geiger’s

spiritualizing of the messianic idea. Rabbi Kook, unlike most of his Orthodox colleagues,

believed that the anti-religious pioneers settling the Land of Israel as part of their Zionist

aspirations, were fulfilling God’s will by building an infrastructure in Eretz Yisrael that

would enable messianic redemption to take place. Let us focus on Kook’s own words:

Many of the adherents of the present national revival maintain that they are

secularists. If a Jewish secular nationalism were really imaginable, then we

would, indeed, be in danger of falling so low as to be beyond redemption…But

what Jewish secular nationalists want they do not themselves know: the spirit of

8 Arthur Hertzberg, ed. and translator, The Zionist Idea: a Historical Analysis and Reader, pp. 103-114.

Israel is so closely linked to the spirit of God that a Jewish nationalist, no matter

how secularist his intention may be, is, despite himself, imbued with the divine

spirit even against his own will. An individual can sever the tie that binds him to

the source of life, but the House of Israel as a whole cannot. All of its most

cherished possessions—its land, language, history, and customs—are vessels of

the spirit of the Lord.9

Thus, in Kook’s worldview, there is no “secular” Zionism. How ingenious of Kook to

resolve the dilemma of how to harness the forces of Jewish religion to the forces of

modern European nationalism within a traditionalist framework. Kook would deny that

he was an innovator. Religious Zionists, who today are Kook’s heirs, would view his

theology as Orthodox and sanctioned by halakhah. There is no doubt that Kook’s views

are within tradition. On the other hand, Kook’s understanding of secular Zionism is a

revolution in modern Jewish thought. Secular Zionism, in its early manifestations, was

making the traditional messianic idea irrelevant. Young Jews were leaving the shtetls of

Eastern Europe for the life on the kibbutz whether God sanctioned it or not. These

halutzim really did not care either way. Kook recaptured the relevance of Zionism to

Jewish theology and traditional Jewish life by transforming secular, political Zionism into

a divine phenomenon, just at the point where the Zionists seemed to be making

traditional messianic ideas and activism irrelevant and placing it beyond the pale of the

Divine. Kook retrieved messianism and returned it to the realm of the here and now, that

of real, living history. Like Geiger, he was a remarkable thinker who struggled to adapt

Judaism to the modern epoch. Kook overturned centuries of traditionalist thought that

9 From Shlomo Avineri, The Making of Modern Zionism, p.193.

encouraged passivity in the Diaspora and, instead, built a theology that made the Land of

Israel the crucial center of all Jewish life and thought. In Kook’s words:

To regard Eretz Israel as a tool for establishing our national unity—or even

sustaining our religion in the Diaspora by preserving its proper character and its

faith, piety, and observance—is a sterile notion; it is unworthy of the holiness of

Eretz Israel. A valid strengthening of Judaism in the Diaspora can come only from

a deepened attachment to Eretz Israel. The hope for the return to the Holy Land is

the continuing source of the distinctive nature of Judaism. The hope for the

Redemption is the force that sustains Judaism in the Diaspora; the Judaism of

Eretz Israel is the very Redemption.10

Thus, Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, like Rabbi Abraham Geiger, was engaged in a

revolution of Copernican import, though neither man would admit that he was in any way

deviating from the essence of Judaism.

In closing, we must ask this question: Did Abraham Geiger and Abraham Isaac Kook

succeed in adapting their respective messianic visions to modern ideology and returning

the messianic idea to the realm of the possible in real, human history rather than rejecting

divine redemption or pushing it off to the end of history? The answer to this question has

yet to be answered. Geiger’s Enlightenment notions of a world of human progress and

universal brotherhood have not materialized. The carnage of the First World War, the

Shoah, the Gulag, the Maoist “Cultural Revolution,” ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, suffering

10 Hertzberg, op cit., pp. 419-20

in Darfur: all of these tragedies argue against the optimism of the European

Enlightenment and Geiger’s vision. If Jews are the agents of a civilizing mission for

humanity, they have failed miserably. We should remain optimistic—but it is hard to

envision Geiger’s messianic human brotherhood in the post-9/11 world.

As for Kook’s messianic vision, that too remains in doubt. Kook’s heirs, especially his

son Zvi Yehudah, were convinced that Israel’s lightning victory over the Arabs in 1967

and the capture of biblical land was a miraculous portent of the coming of the Messiah.11

But now, it is forty years later, and the Messiah still has not arrived. If Israel holds on to

all the land that it captured legitimately in the Six-Day War, it will face a demographic

crisis and the end of a Jewish majority in what is supposed to be a Jewish—and

democratic—state. With an influx of hundreds of thousands of Jews to Israel from the

former atheistic Soviet Union, the Jewish State is faced with a large portion of the

population that has no interest in Kook’s vision. The movement to settle the West Bank

and Gaza is in crisis—Religious Zionism placed all of its eggs in the basket of settlement

and now faces itself as a movement without a cause for existing. The Muslim holy places

have sat on the Temple Mount for 1300 years—a Third Temple will not replace them in

the near future (despite the efforts of an extreme fringe of Religious Zionists to destroy

them). Israel today is engaged in a kulturkampf—a cultural struggle—between religious

and secular Jews. This struggle has even resulted in one Jew murdering another Jew—in

fact, the Prime Minister of the Jewish State—in the name of Kook’s vision. Abraham

Isaac Kook’s idea of all Jews participating in the drama of Jewish and human redemption

is beautiful. But it does have a very dark side. In the end, we cannot yet answer whether,

11 Karen Armstrong, The Battle for God: A History of Fundamentalism, p.263.

indeed, the messianic idea as posited by Jewish theology in the modern epoch, has made

its ultimate return to human history.

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