Judah ben Solomon Hai Alkalai

Sephardic rabbi

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Oct. 18, 2026 •History

Judah ben Solomon Hai Alkalai (born 1798, Sarajevo, Bosnia, Ottoman Empire [now Bosnia and Herzegovina]—died 1878, Jerusalem, Palestine) was a Sephardic rabbi and an early advocate of Jewish colonization of Palestine whose writings and efforts preceded the rise of Zionism.

Alkalai was taken to Jerusalem at an early age, and there he was reared and educated for the rabbinate. At 25 he went to Semlin (Zemun, near Belgrade, Serbia), as a rabbi and found himself teaching Hebrew to the young men of his congregation, whose native language was Ladino. He wrote two books in that language, in the first of which he argued that a physical “return to Israel” (i.e., to Eretz Yisraʾel, the Holy Land in Palestine) was a precondition for redemption (salvation), instead of the symbolic “return to Israel” by means of repentance and resuming the ways of God. This doctrine was unacceptable to Orthodox Jews and generated much controversy. His second book was a refutation of the heated attacks directed at his proto-Zionist views.

After the Damascus Affair of 1840—an antisemitic outburst involving blood libel—Alkalai took to admonishing Jews that the event was part of a divine design to awaken Jews to the reality of their condition in exile in the Jewish Diaspora. Believing that Jews should migrate nowhere but to Palestine, he traveled in England and about Europe seeking support for such emigration, founding organizations wherever he went, but these came to naught. Finally in 1871 he left his congregation at Semlin and went to Palestine, where he created a new organization, a society for settlement. It too failed. But Alkalai’s writings—he was an inveterate pamphleteer—did have some effect, as did one book—his first in Hebrew—Goral Ladonai (1857; “A Lot for the Lord”). These and his personal migration helped pave the way for the coming Zionism of Theodor Herzl and others.