JUDAISM cultivates in its followers a longing for the messianic age, without providing explicit details about just what this entails. This state of affairs has inspired Jews over the ages to proffer their opinions, producing a rich and variegated array of messianic scenarios—largely in the form of isolated pieces of biblical exegesis—for future generations to adopt or reject as they see fit. Jewish leaders seem to have fostered this state of confusion, for they have been unable to agree upon a definition of the messianic idea, and they have often bristled at those who have bothered to articulate an explicit formulation of it. Any effort to construct a uniform doctrine breeds controversy, for it involves a selection of visions of the messianic age and the processes necessary to bring it about, as well as a rejection of other visions and processes. Structurally, there was no way of achieving consensus. Like many other tenets of Jewish belief that were never clarified once and for all, the messianic concept again and again generated friction between proponents of differing views. This book focuses on a crucial modern shift in this struggle.

Late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Europe was the site of disputations because of the modernizing processes unfolding there. Three important changes in European society generated tension within Jewry and portended major shifts in the political and legal status of Jews. Intellectually, the primary development was the increasingly widespread belief that it was possible to seek a rational explanation of all phenomena, and that such rational explanations were the most accurate apprehensions of reality. The primary political change was the centralization of the state's administrative organs towards a more efficient and direct manner of governing and towards an equalization of subjects. Also significant was the growth of an economic mindset that encouraged saving, investment, long-range planning, and delay of gratification in order to improve earthly life. Each one of these pressures, separately and combined, portended changes in the status of Jews, and each influenced interpreters of the messianic concept. For example, Jews stimulated by the new rationalism suggested that the messianic hope should be envisaged in more naturalistic terms that incorporated the new economic ideologies.