Abstract: Offering a novel understanding of the origins of renewed Jewish settlement in the Land of Israel in modern times, this book situates that settlement in the context of Jewish messianism and traces it to a wave of messianic fervor that swept the Jewish world during the first half of the 19th century. Believing that the Messiah would appear in the year 5600 AM (1840 CE), thousands of Jews immigrated to the Land of Israel from throughout the Ottoman Empire, North Africa, and Eastern Europe. This book focuses primarily on the immigration (“aliyah”) of the disciples of the Ga’on of Vilna, the Eastern European opponents of Hasidism (known in the Land of Israel as the Perushim) who, notwithstanding their vaunted rationalism, were characterized by a strong mystical and messianic bent. In recounting their story, the book describes their complex and changing relationships with the ruling Ottoman and Egyptian authorities, with the Anglican missionaries then active in Jerusalem (principally the London Society for Promoting Christianity Amongst the Jews), and with the Organization of Peqidim and Amarkalim (Clerk’s organization) in Amsterdam and its head, Zevi Hirsch Lehren. The book makes extensive use of the newly discovered archives of the Peqidim and Amarkalim, of the diaries and journals of the Anglican missionaries, of kabbalistic texts from throughout North Africa and the Near East, and of previously unavailable manuscripts by the disciples of the Vilna Ga’on. Finally, the book recounts the varied responses to the Messiah’s failure to appear in 1840, and the continued growth in the Jewish community, a precursor to the emergence of modern political Zionism in the late 19th century.

Keywords: Messiah, Jewish Messianism, aliyah, yishuv, Jerusalem, Ga’on of Vilna, Perushim, Peqidim, Amarkalim, Zevi Hirsch Lehren