Today synagogues regularly hold fundraising drives for various Zionist and pro-Israel causes and charities. Yet as originally envisioned by Theodor Herzl, Zionism was a secular, not a religious movement: his 1902 novel Neualtland pictured the new Zion as a socialist utopia. While the Zionists believed that it was impossible for Jews to be "assimilated" into a foreign society, their dream state was essentially a liberal European community, with Hebrew spoken in place of German, French or English. Most were indifferent to the Jewish religion at best. Many were openly contemptuous of Rabbis who believed that only the Moshiach could re-establish the Kingdom of Israel… and saw the traditions of orthodox Judaism as superstitions which only served to keep the Jewish people in the ghettos. For their part, many rabbis accused the Zionists of favoring "Goyischekeit" (Gentile Culture) for the Jewish people. They saw Herzl's Zion not as the fulfillment of prophecies but as a disaster which would draw Jews away from the Torah and from observance of the laws. To them, the exile and wandering were ordained by G-d, and any effort to end them without His assistance was blasphemous and doomed to failure.

Early Zionism was not even committed to Palestinian settlement. In 1903 the World Zionist Congress voted for a proposal to established a Jewish settlement in Uganda, while other Zionists proposed establishment of Jewish colonies in Canada, Australia, Libya, Mesopotamia, and Texas. This changed in 1917, when Britain's "Balfour Declaration" declared Her Majesty's support for the establishment of a Jewish state in the British Mandate of Palestine. This was a major coup for the Zionist movement, and attention was now focused on the biblical Land of Israel. Yet even then many religious Jews who spoke out against Zionism… including many who lived in Palestine. The Orthodox residents, including the Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem, had little use for the secular newcomers. Relations between the Orthodox and the new settlers would reach their nadir in 1924, when Yaakov Yisrael Dehan, an influential anti-Zionist Rabbi, was shot and killed by Zionist Avraham Tahomi. Dehan had arranged for a meeting of Orthodox leaders with Transjordanian leader King Abdullah and other Arab leaders, to confront the "Zionist problem;" his murderer was a high-ranking member of the Haganah, the Jewish defense organization which had formed after Arab riots in 1920. This exacerbated tensions between the non-observant and the Haredim ("righteous"). It was bad enough that the Zionists had stirred up tensions among the neighboring Arabs, they grumbled: now Jews had to fear their fellow Jews.

Orthodox sympathy for Zionism increased after Hitler's rise to power and the subsequent slaughter of much of Europe's Jewish population. The British refusal to allow further Jewish emigration into the Mandate territories from 1939 onward increased that death toll… and increased support for a Jewish state which would not be reliant upon the whims of outside rulers. With Britain's 1948 withdrawal from the region, the debate largely ended: the State of Israel was now a fait accompli, and most religious Jews cast their support behind it. (Not all, though: there are several Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox sects, like the Satmarim and Neturei Karta, who still oppose the existence of the State of Israel). They might have debated about the nature of a Jewish state before its founding - indeed, many of those debates continue to this day. But other questions had been rendered irrelevant by history. Not only did they now have a Jewish homeland… many of them had no place else to go.

While the State of Israel may be a secular kingdom founded by secular Jews, it has had a tremendous impact on Jewish religious thought. Despite the misgivings of many Rabbis, there was and had always been a strong Zionist component to Jewish religion and culture. Passover celebrates the Exodus from Egypt and promises "next year in Jerusalem;" T'isha B'av mourns the destruction of the First and Second Temple. While many Orthodox Jews might have had misgivings about the lax observance of many of the Zionist settlers, they were sympathetic to the idea of a Jewish state in Palestine. Today most religious Jews consider 1948 as the beginning of a new era for Judaism, a date as important as 70 A.D. and the destruction of the Second Temple. It is difficult to say how Israel's continued existence - or the end of the Jewish state - will shape religious Judaism in the future.