Against All Odds: ‘Eight People We Met on the Way Home’ Offers Concise Look at Founders of Modern Zionism

It seemed like an impossible dream: Jews resettling the land of Israel in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Everything seemed against it. The area was an economic and agricultural wasteland. Ottoman and British rulers both opposed Jewish immigration. The indigenous Arabs were violently hostile to the arrival of Jews. 

And yet, as Rabbi Berel Wein writes in his new book, “Eight People We Met on the Way Home,” “against all odds and against all opinions of pundits from every section of Jewish society,” Jews began to reclaim and resettle the land. Wein is a preeminent scholar and historian whose dazzling intellectual output of books, lecture series, articles and films have made a vast contribution to Jewish knowledge for more than fifty years. His coffee-table-sized trilogy on Jewish history (“Echoes of Glory,” “Herald of Destiny,” and “Triumph of Survival”) takes readers from 350 BCE to the modern era and is a treasured staple in many Jewish homes. Every Shabbat afternoon, my husband and I read a page or two from his commentary on Ethics of the Fathers. Rabbi Wein’s insights are spiritually deep and worldly, his writing always clear and to the point.

“Eight People We Met on the Way Home” is a concise look at eight key personalities who helped make the dream of a modern Zionist state a startling reality. These men were vastly divergent religiously, politically, nationally, culturally, and socioeconomically. This “cast of characters [was] hardly imaginable in the realms of history and politics,” he writes. They are Rabbi Naftali Zvi Yehuda Berlin (known as the Netziv), Baron Edmond James de Rothschild, Theodor Herzl, Chaim Weizmann, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, David Ben-Gurion, Louis Brandeis and Menachem Begin. 

Nearly all these names are familiar as movers and shakers behind the modern Zionist movement, but the name of Rabbi Berlin may come as a surprise. Rabbi Berlin headed the famed Yeshiva of Volozhin for nearly forty years, from the 1850s until the Russians shut it down in 1892. He was influenced in favor of the concept of Jewish emancipation from a book, “Rome and Jerusalem: A Study in Jewish Nationalism,” published in 1862 by Moses Hess. The book would later influence Theodor Herzel and argued that Jews would never be welcomed in European society and needed a country of their own.  

Jewish oppression in the latter years of the nineteenth century — including waves of pogroms — was already propelling millions away from Eastern Europe and toward Western Europe and the United States. Rabbi Berlin, along with two other rabbinic colleagues, are credited as founders of the modern Religious Zionist movement, known as the Lovers of Zion (Chovevei Tzion). Though the founders were all religious, the movement attracted secular Jews as well. 

The few hundred intrepid souls who first braved their chances in Ottoman-controlled Palestine were mostly religious Jews and became part of the First Aliyah of the late 1880s. But with little understanding of farming or the land, many of their efforts failed and they suffered enormous hardships. Still, despite their impractical goals and sparse numbers, “the movement of rabbis and followers, agnostics and dreamers, to the Land of Israel over the 70 years from 1835 to 1905 changed the trajectory of Jewish history,” Wein writes.

Baron Edmond Rothschild was an outsider in Jewish society with a troubled conscience over his vast wealth. This prompted him to become the most famous of benefactors for aliyah, purchasing land throughout Israel and founding nearly thirty small colonies. Wein regards his support as both “visionary and highly productive,” encouraging Jews worldwide who were considering aliyah. There are Rothschild Streets in many towns throughout Israel, most famously in Tel Aviv. 

Though a thoroughly assimilated French Jew, Baron Rothschild became “one of the most pivotal saviors of the Jewish people in the tumultuous times of the latter part of the 19th century and early 20th century.”  

Theodor Herzl had also seemed an unlikely champion of a Jewish state. A secular Viennese journalist distraught about rampant antisemitism, he argued that “rabbis should lead their congregations to the baptismal font of Christianity … solv(ing) the Jewish problem once and for all.” Yet in covering the show trial of Alfred Dreyfus, falsely accused of treason because he was Jewish, Herzl experienced his own baptism by fire, recognizing that the abuse of Dreyfus proved that assimilation was not the answer. He invested the rest of his brief life into helping found a Jewish state — even if he was misguided enough to have backed its founding in Uganda. 

The one American profiled here is Louis Brandeis, an outspoken supporter of the Zionist cause in the U.S. when it was politically and socially costly to do so. Born in 1856 in Louisville, Kentucky to immigrants from Prague, the family was culturally German and totally secular. Through the influence of an Orthodox uncle who was a lawyer and Zionist, Brandeis became a leading antitrust litigator and defender of the growing labor movement. He was the first Jewish justice to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court, but his nomination fight dragged on for four months. Most opposition stemmed from his anti-business bent, but his Jewishness also unnerved the establishment. 

Brandeis lent the Zionist movement prestige at a time when “most American Jews were preoccupied with Americanization.” He denied the charge that American Jews who supported a Jewish state would prove less loyal to the United States. In fact, he argued, it would increase their loyalty to a country that offered refuge from hotbeds of antisemitism in Europe and supported the right to a Jewish homeland. Brandeis is credited with influencing the Wilson administration in negotiations leading up to the Balfour Declaration, through which the British began to allow limited immigration to Palestine. 

All eight profiles offer striking, succinct and colorful portraits of modern Zionism’s many fathers, including context for their often virulent disagreements with one another over strategy, policy and the religious flavor of the newly established state.

Wein, now 90, wrote much of this book during Israel’s current war against Hamas. Having seen so much of history, he writes, “I find comfort and direction in the fact that everything that has happened to us was foretold thousands of years ago.“

Wein, now 90, wrote much of this book during Israel’s current war against Hamas. Having seen so much of history, he writes, “I find comfort and direction in the fact that everything that has happened to us was foretold thousands of years ago, that our progression through history follows a pattern outlined by the revelation of Heaven to its prophetic messengers.”  Seeing the guiding hand of God behind everything, he suggests that we can best understand the current chaos by shunning the pundits and instead finding “solace, hope, and vision in the ancient books that the Jewish people have guarded and treasured throughout the ages. One sentence in the book of Isaiah contains more truth and wisdom than hundreds of editorials and media analyses.”

Judy Gruen Judy Gruen is the author of “Bylines and Blessings,” “The Skeptic and the Rabbi,” and several other books. She is also a book editor and writing coach.