Torah and National Return Joined

Religious Zionism organized as a distinct current within the wider Zionist movement through the Mizrachi movement, founded in 1902 by Rabbi Isaac Jacob Reines, which held that religious observance and Jewish national return were compatible and mutually reinforcing commitments rather than the rivals many contemporaries on both sides assumed them to be.

Mizrachi operated within the World Zionist Organization's institutions alongside the movement's secular currents, a practical alliance built on a shared national goal even where religious and secular Zionists differed sharply on the place of Jewish law in the future national life they were organizing toward. The clearest and most theologically influential development within religious Zionism came from Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, the first Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Mandatory Palestine, who argued that the secular pioneers building the pre-state Jewish community, whatever their own irreligious self understanding, were nonetheless instruments of a divinely directed process of national and spiritual redemption, a theological reading that gave secular Zionist activity itself religious significance within a specifically religious Zionist framework.