The medieval Jewish Torah scholar
Maimonides advocated a re-establishment of Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel in a lengthy preface to his
13 principles of faith. He wrote that Jewish national independence would come about through natural means and argued for political activism to bring it about. Likewise, the medieval Jewish philosopher
Judah HaLevi also espoused Proto-Zionist ideas, writing that only in the Land of Israel could Jews be truly secure. According to
Ben-Zion Dinur, the
aliyah of
Judah HeHasid and his group in 1700 inaugurated a new era during which processes such as encouraging productivity, the
revival of the Hebrew language and national aspirations developed.
Nahum Sokolow described proto-Zionists as anyone who wished to renew the Jewish community in the Land of Israel, or who wrote about the Jewish problem, starting from the 17th century. This broad definition included such figures as
Moses Montefiore,
Adolphe Crémieux,
Eliezer Ben-Yehuda and
Sabbatai Zevi. Nathan Michael Gerber also traced the forerunners of Zionism back to the 17th century. According to Arie Morgenstern, the
Vilna Gaon of Lithuania, Elijah ben Solomon Zalman (1720–1797), promoted a teaching from the
Zohar (book of Jewish mysticism) citing the prediction that "the gates of wisdom above and the founts of wisdom below will open" "after six hundred years of the sixth millennium" i.e. after the year 5600 of the Jewish calendar (1839–1840 AD). Many understood this to imply the coming of the Messiah at that time. This early wave of Jewish migration to the Holy Land began in 1808 and crested in 1840. Although the Messiah did not appear, the Ottoman government took control of Palestine from the Egyptians in 1840, and its recently established rights for all Ottoman citizens—regardless of religion—was thus extended to the non-Muslim populations of Palestine, including the Jewish people there. The right to purchase and own land was a particularly significant, if less noticed, milepost in the return of the Jewish people to the Holy Land.
Jacob Katz argues that it is possible to point out three men as "forerunners of Zionism": Rabbi
Judah ben Solomon Hai Alkalai, Rabbi
Zvi Hirsch Kalischer, and thinker
Moses Hess. Although other people acted in various forms, it is the actions of this triad that left their imprint on the
Hovevei Zion.
Samuel Leib Zitron cited Rabbi Alkalai as the pioneer of modern political Zionism. Katz further argues that the Rabbis Alkalai and Kalisher changed their religious worldview, abandoning the "Basics of non-realistic perception of traditional Messianic views". He also explains that during their actions as forerunners of Zionism there "was not on the agenda an issue of lack of rights to Jews or social discrimination" and thus the modern idea of Jewish nationalism was not a success in the years they operated. From the late 1870s until the eve of World War I, with growing economic plight of Eastern European Jews and the rising wave of anti-Semitism, two and a half million Jews left Eastern Europe; only a small percentage of them emigrated to Israel. Citron and
Samuel Ettinger, who argued that even if preceded by the movement of Hovevei Zion were different personalities who tackled the Jewish problem, the few acts that they were at hand to do did not leave an impression for generations, did not affect anything on the Zionist movement, and thus there is no person that could be called "harbinger of Zionism". ==Notable proto-Zionists==