Seeking Zion

Abstract

This article looks at Grace Aguilar (1816–1847), a well-known Anglo-Jewish author, as a religious Zionist, and it analyzes Aguilar’s work in order to challenge three scholarly assumptions about the history of Zionism: first, that British Jews have never genuinely supported Zionism; second, that Zionism did not exist before Theodor Herzl, the founder of political Zionism; and third, that Jewish women rarely voiced Zionist ideas before the establishment of the State of Israel. Aguilar, an Anglo-Jewish woman writer who published during the mid-Victorian period, espoused orthodox views about the Jews’ restoration to Palestine. Aguilar’s belief in the biblical precept of Jewish nationhood was a precursor to the thought of later Zionists such as Herzl, as well as the convictions of religious Zionists such as Rav Kook. Her religious nationalism provides an important counterpoint to scholarly claims that Victorian Jews identified only as British, as no different than their Christian neighbors. Instead, Aguilar characterizes the Jews as a nation apart, a people bound together by an ancient religion with roots and a future in Palestine.