Zionism’s Redemptions

Zionism combined dialogues with Jewish, Christian, and secular messianisms to create a politics based in redemptive visions of its own.

Zionism's Redemptions will interest scholars in Israel Studies and Jewish Studies. As a study of the relations between nationalism and religious traditions, it will interest scholars of nationalism. It bears implications for understandings of modernity, space and place, Jews and Judaism in the modern world.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.