Judah Alkalai

Judah ben Solomon Chai Alkalai (1798 – October 1878) was a Bosnian rabbi, and one of the influential precursors of modern Zionism along with the Prussian Rabbi Zvi Hirsch Kalischer. Although he was a Sephardic Jew, he played an important role in a process widely attributed to the Ashkenazi Jews. At that time Bosnia and Herzegovina was under Ottoman Empire.

He studied in Jerusalem, which also belonged to the Ottoman Turkish Empire, under different rabbis and came under the influence of the Kabbalah.

In 1871 Alkalai visited Jerusalem and established another short-lived colonization society.

Religious base for activism Alkalai's view of Jewish return to the Land of Israel was a religious one. He maintained, based on an ample body of religious literature, that the coming of the Messiah and divine redemption of the Jews required their return to the Promised Land. His Kabbalistic view made him specifically assert that the year 1840 was the Year of Redemption, which was not a single year, but "a century, from this day until 1939", representing the "days of the Messiah". Unless powerful practical steps were taken, this opportunity would be lost, and the next extended "year" starting in 1940 would be one of great hardship when "with an outpouring of wrath will gather our dispersed". The outcome - the return to the Promised Land - would be the same, but under much harsher circumstances.

Political proto-Zionism Alkalai began by writing in Ladino, which limited his outreach to the rather small European Sephardic community. Only later did he adopt the much wider understood Hebrew language, and he only intensified his political work after the age of 60, at a time when a wider audience seemed to be ready to accept his ideas. Although Alkalai and others, such as Rabbi Zvi Hirsch Kalischer, put much energy into promoting its goals, the association couldn't reach any tangible results and soon dispersed.