Modern Zionism, as Arthur Hertzberg wrote in the introduction to his classic text The Zionist Idea, “represents a crisis […] in the essential meaning of Jewish messianism.”1 Indeed, a great deal of literature has examined this crisis and the complex relationship between Zionism and Jewish messianic yearnings and ideas. Originally published in 1959, Hertzberg’s volume, and particularly his introduction, constituted an effort to introduce the topic of Zionism into serious, rigorous scholarship and represented an explicitly stated attempt to question what had been a prevalent position in the interpretation of Zionism up until that point, represented in particular (as Hertzberg points out) by the Zionist (and later Israeli) historian Ben-Zion Dinur.