Zionism's Redemptions Images of the Past and Visions of the Future in Jewish Nationalism

In this volume, Arieh Saposnik examines the complicated relations between nationalism and religious (and non-religious) redemptive traditions through the case study of Zionism. He provides a new framework for understanding the central ideas of this movement and its relationship to traditional Jewish ideas, Christian thought, and modern secular messianisms. Providing a longue-durée and broad view of the central themes and motivations in the making of Zionism, Saposnik connects its intellectual history with the concrete development of the Zionist project in Israel in its cultural, social, and political history. Saposnik demonstrates how Zionism offers lessons for a politics in which human perfectibility continues to serve as a guiding light and as a counter-narrative to the contemporary politics of self-interest, self-promotion and 'post-truth.' This is a study that bears implications for our understanding of modernity, of space and place, history and historical trajectories, and the place of Jews and Judaism in the modern world.

1. Introduction; 2. Rivalries, rescues, redemptions – Zionism's formative moment as a redemptive movement?; 3. Echoing paradigms – exodus and redemption in Zionism and Palestine; 4. Expounding exile, narrating redemption; 6. Sites of redemption: redeeming a Zion unredeemed; 7. Zionism and the Christian holy land; 8. Conclusion: redeeming Zionist redemptions?

Arieh Saposnik is Associate Professor at the Ben-Gurion Research Institute for the Study of Israel and Zionism at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.