“To be Strangers in Your Land”

Israel as an Ascetic Space in Early Modern Ashkenazi Culture

Abstract

Despite the physical exile of the Jews from the Holy Land, Eretz Yisrael persisted as a prominent component of Jewish mentality. Beyond its presence in Jewish thought and liturgy, the Holy Land was a major destination for Jewish pilgrimage and immigration (Aliyah). Some historians have depicted this kind of immigration, and especially its early modern occurrences, as a precursor to late nineteenth-century Zionist depictions of the Land of Israel as Heimatland. In this article, I present an additional image of the Land of Israel. Its roots lie in the Middle Ages, but its most developed textual presentations can be found in early modern writings of Ashkenazi rabbis from Poland, Germany, and Bohemia. In this image, the Land of Israel is not a homey motherland but rather a holy space, designated to facilitate an ascetic way of life for people who wish to expiate their sins and purify and spiritualize their bodies. As I show, Ashkenazi Jews tended to perceive the Land of Israel as fertile ground for the realization of the notion of atonement and abstinence. I examine this issue in the wider context of the cultural processes of Ashkenazi intellectual history in the sixteenth century. In particular, I investigate the influence of medieval Sephardic kabbalistic and philosophic works on the rendering of Ashkenazi practices and traditions. In this way, I contextualize the local discussion on the ascetic image of Eretz Israel in the wider complexity of change and continuity that Jewish culture underwent in the early modern era.