‘The Invention of a Tradition: The Messianic Zionism of the Gaon of Vilna’
By Immanuel Etkes
Foreword by David Biale
Stanford University Press, 234 pages

“What is at stake” in Immanuel Etkes’s book, historian David Biale declares, is “not only historical truth but also the very identity of Zionism as a national movement.” One key question: Did Zionism begin as a secular or a religious mission? 

In the 1940s, Shlomo Zalman Rivlin published several texts that he said were written by the followers of the Gaon of Vilna, a towering intellectual who was a much revered religious figure in 18th century Europe. He is supposed to have believed in messianic Zionism, declaring that the redemption of the Jewish people required their settlement in what became the modern state of Israel. 

Rivlin’s texts in the 1940s were largely forgotten until the Israeli victory in the 1967 Six-Day War, which was interpreted in terms of what Mr. Etkes calls the “Rivlinian myth” that disestablished the secular founders and the politics of modern Israel.

Mr. Etkes’s book is a painstaking demolition of Shlomo Zalman Rivlin’s messianic Zionism. The texts Rivlin attributed to the Gaon’s followers were actually written by Rivlin in order to wrest authority from the secular Zionists and to restore the Rivlin family to the central place among the followers of Gaon and messianic Zionism. 

Mr. Etkes searches Gaon’s writings and those of his followers and finds no evidence of messianic Zionism. He searches for the original texts that Rivlin said he edited, and none of them are extant — because, Mr. Etkes concludes, they never existed.

Working like a philologist, Mr. Etkes shows that the Rivlin texts that purported to be the work of Gaon’s messianic Zionist followers contain stylistic traits that are Rivlin’s, not those of the 18th and 19th century Gaon-inspired writers he claimed to be publishing for the first time. “The man and his literary motives,” Mr. Etkes concludes, are a “clear instance of the phenomena call pseudoepigraphy, that is writing attributed to an ancient figure so as to grant it prestige and authority.”

Mr Etkes then asks the inevitable question: Why did Rivlin “repeat the same idea and storylines over and over again in his various works, trying to lend them credibility and validity? It seems that the answer to all these questions lies in his biography.” 

Rivlin was born in Jerusalem in the “Old Yishuv”— the Jews living in Palestine before the first wave of Zionist immigration in the 1880s. Attracted to but also threatened by the “New Yishuv” of the late 19th century, Rivlin sought to amalgamate the imperatives of two clashing societies, as he aimed to situate the Rivlin family into the religious beliefs of his ancestors, which now had to include the very messianic Zionism that Mr. Etkes could not find in the Old Yishuv.  

Near the end of his book, Mr. Etkes explains why the “Rivilian myth” matters: Prime Minister Netanyau quoted Rivlin as though it were the Gaon of Vilna speaking through one of Rivlin’s bogus texts, telling his students “about the mitzvah,” or commandment, to “immigrate to the land of Israel.”

“The adoption and cultivation of the myth of the Gaon and his disciples as the first Zionists, whether done out of naivety and historical ignorance or from extraneous motives,” Mr. Etkes emphasizes, “is an attempt to deny the origins and character of Zionism as a modern phenomenon, with all that this entails. Accordingly, the present work has sought to challenge a myth whose origin and teaching is a distortion of history and an attempt to create an alternative history. It is dedicated to all those who believe that responsible engagement with the challenges of the present and of the future must be based on familiarity with the historical truth, insofar as critical scholarship is able to reveal and to reconstruct it.”

Mr. Etkes demonstrates that the sway of the “Rivlinian myth” also derives from the powerful creation of an alternative biography for the Gaon of Vilna, a biography spuriously created out of brief fragments from the Gaon’s writings and those of his followers in order to concoct the primacy of a messianic Zionism that exists nowhere outside of “Rivlinian myth.”

Mr. Rollyson is author of “A Higher Form of Cannibalism? Adventures in the Art and Politics of Biography.”