the restoration of the sacrificial cult, no longer expressed
the views of the Jew in Western civilization. The prayer for the
rebuilding of Jerusalem and the restoration of the Temple with its
priestly cult could no longer voice his religious hope. Thus the leaders
of Reform Judaism in the middle of the nineteenth century declared
themselves unanimously opposed to retaining the belief in a personal
Messiah and the political restoration of Israel, either in doctrine or in
their liturgy.(1225) They accentuated all the more strongly Israel's hope
for a Messianic age, a time of universal knowledge of God and love of man,
so intimately interwoven with the religious mission of the Jewish people.
Harking back to the suffering Servant of the Lord in Deutero-Isaiah, they
transferred the title of Messiah to the Jewish nation. Reform Judaism has
thus accepted the belief that Israel, the suffering Messiah of the
centuries, shall at the end of days become the triumphant Messiah of the
nations.(1226)

11. This view taken by reform Judaism is the logical outcome of the
political and social emancipation of the Jew in western Europe and
America. Naturally, it had no appeal to the Jew in the Eastern lands,
where he was kept apart by mental training, social habits and the
discrimination of the law, so that he regarded himself as a member of a
different nationality in every sense. Palestine remained the object of his
hope and longing in both his social and religious life. When modern ideas
of life began to transform the religious views and habits in many a
quarter, and terrible persecutions again aroused the longing of the
unfortunate sufferers for a return to the land of their fathers, the term
Zionism was coined, and the movement rapidly spread. It expressed the
purely national aims of the Jewish people, disregarding the religious
aspirations always heretofore connected with the Messianic hope. This term
has since become the watchword of all those who hope for a political
restoration of the Jewish people on Palestinian soil, as well as of others
whose longings are of a more cultural nature. Both regard the Jewish
people as a nation like any other, denying to it the specific character of
a priest-people and a holy nation with a religious mission for humanity,
which has been assigned to it at the very beginning of its history and has
served to preserve it through the centuries. On this account Zionism,
whether political or cultural, can ha