Erets Iśra’el (The Land of Israel): The Homeland, Its Jews, and Their Orienting Influence

This chapter focuses on the orienting influence that the Land of Israel, both as an idea and as a place with an important (though impoverished and beleaguered) Jewish community, had on the early modern Jewish Diaspora. From a description of the experiences of two very different diasporic Jews in the Jewish homeland, the chapter moves to a discussion of normative rabbinic notions and practices that underwrote diasporic Jews’ relationship to the Holy Land. The author discusses how the Land of Israel was the focus of Jews’ dreams of redemption that focused on the end of the Jewish dispersion and the reestablishment of Jewish sovereignty; how daily Jewish practices in all corners of the Diaspora-indeed, dominant Jewish conceptions of time itself-were keyed to the Land of Israel’s natural and agricultural rhythms; how the traditional Jewish practice of immigration to the Holy Land waxed and waned in the early modern centuries; and how emissaries from the Jews’ historic homeland became key actors in the early modern Diaspora, promoting and disseminating, among other things, locally developed mystical innovations, messianic movements, and conservative reactions to these trends.