Volume 4 No 1 - Journal for the Study of Antisemitism

Almost There
Daniel Cohn-Sherbok’s
Introduction to Zionism: From Ideology to History
(New York and London: Continuum, 2012). 250 pp. $25.00
Michael Berenbaum*
Some books attempt to cover too much and some too little: this book
does both. Permit me to explain: in a brief and well-written work, Daniel
Cohn-Sherbok attempts to cover the history of Zionism. His survey is interesting
but shallow. He includes Christian Zionism, covering early Christian
Zionism, premillennial dispensationalism, as well as the early links between
Christian leaders and Jewish efforts to achieve the Jewish commonwealth.
He then drops the subject altogether and does not consider the contemporary
impact of Christian Zionism, which pervades the Republican race for
U.S. president and support for hawkish Israeli policies in the United States.
In the second part of the book, when Cohn-Sherbok moves swiftly—
all too swiftly—from Zionist theory to an abbreviated history of the state of
Israel and the Arab-Israeli conflict, he neglects to carry forth Zionist ideology
into its current iterations. For example, he draws no connection
between the Zionist thought of Rav Kook the elder and his son’s more
explicitly messianic views articulated on the eve of the Six-Day War, which
were regarded as words of prophecy by his disciples and led them to settle
the West Bank in the post 1967 euphoria and to join the secular settler
movement with a messianic passion and ultimately to dominate it; some
religious Jews in Israel regard the conquest of the land as the prelude to
imminent redemption. Nor does Cohn-Sherbok explore the link between the
Stern Gang’s ideology and the religiously motivated violence that pits Jews
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