Pangs of the Messiah: The Troubled Birth of the Jewish State

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Pangs of the Messiah: The Troubled Birth of the Jewish State

 Martin Sicker - author.
Publisher: Praeger. Place of Publication: Westport, CT. Publication Year: 2000

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Introduction

For many centuries, Jews all over the world ended their traditional cele-
brations of the festival of Passover, commemorating the redemption of
the Israelites from servitude in Egypt, with the cry "Next Year in Jeru-
salem." This expression reflected the indelible faith, maintained by the
Jewish people since the destruction of their state by the Romans in the
first century, that the time would come when the dispersed people of Is-
rael would be gathered together once again and reconstituted as an
autonomous nation in their own land. However, as historical circum-
stances seemed to conspire relentlessly against the realization of this as-
piration, it soon became transformed into a dream that was expected to
be realized only in a far-off messianic time to come.

There had always been a remnant of the nation living in Palestine,
the name given to the land of Israel by the Romans to efface its memory
as the national patrimony of the Jewish people. There also had always
been a trickle of hardy individuals who immigrated there to immerse
themselves in the sanctity of the Holy Land. Nonetheless, the idea of a
political restoration of the ancient Jewish state seemed rather far-
fetched to a people the vast majority of whom had lived in the Diaspora
for some eighteen centuries. By the beginning of the nineteenth cen-
tury, however, the course of history had taken some unanticipated
turns that slowly made realization of the dream of Israel's restoration
appear once again to be within the realm of historical possibility. The
story of those unanticipated turns is told in an earlier work of mine,
Reshaping Palestine: From Muhammad Ali to the British Mandate, 1831-1922.