הרב יהודה אלקלעי

Rav Yehuda ben Shlomo Chai Alkalai (5558/1798–4 Tishrei 5639/1878), known in English sources as Judah Alkalai, was a Sephardi rav in the Balkans who gave his life to the settling of Eretz Yisrael and drew up a detailed plan for a home for the Jewish people there some fifty years before Theodor Herzl. He was born in Sarajevo, then under Ottoman rule, where his father served as rav of the city and head of the kehillah. At eleven he went up to Eretz Yisrael, and while still young he received semichah in Yerushalayim as a talmid of Rav Eliezer Papo, author of Pele Yoetz. In 5585/1825, at twenty-seven, he was sent to serve as rav in Zemlin — Zemun, beside Belgrade — then held by the Austrian Empire.

His meeting with Rav Yehuda Bibas in 1839 shaped his thinking on the geulah, and the Damascus blood libel of the following year settled him in the view that the Jewish people needed a land of its own. In 5603/1843 he published Minchat Yehuda, derashot threaded through with a call to aliyah, which he dedicated to the Jews of Damascus. He had begun writing in Ladino, in Darchei Noam and Shalom Yerushalayim, and turned later to Hebrew, which reached far more readers.

He supported the revival of Hebrew as the national language, an approach to the Ottoman sultan and to the European powers, an organized body to settle the land, banks to gather private capital to develop it, and the acquisition of land by purchase, as Avraham Avinu bought the field and the cave at Chevron. During the 1850s he traveled through France, England and Germany seeking support, and in Goral LaHashem (Vienna, 5617/1857) he laid out the whole plan; the sefer ran through three editions and was rendered into English. He read the words of Chazal that “all the ketzim have passed and the matter depends only on teshuvah” as teshuvah in the sense of returning to Eretz Yisrael, and taught that the natural redemption comes before the miraculous one, Mashiach ben Yosef before Mashiach ben David. In the introduction to Lashon Limudim he wrote that by kabbalistic reckoning the hundred years from 5600 to 5700 (1840–1940) were fit for geulah, and warned of great trouble should the opening be missed.

Herzl’s grandfather, Shimon Aryeh Herzl, was his talmid in Zemlin, helped print his sefarim there, and blew the shofar in his shul. In 1865 Rav Alkalai returned to Eretz Yisrael, living first in Yafo and then in Yerushalayim, and in the summer of 5634/1874 he settled there for good with his wife Esther. He was niftar on 4 Tishrei 5639/1878 and was buried in the Sephardi section of the cemetery on Har HaZeitim, his wife ten days after him. The city of Or Yehuda carries his name.