In the comments to my camel post (
link) the discussion concerned notions of Jewish restoration to Palestine in the early 19th century. My friend Dan pointed out that after the failure of his Ararat project, Mordecai M. Noah made a speech about restoration of the Jews to Palestine, years before Rabbi Kalischer or Simcha Pinsker had begun advocating proto-Zionism. Perhaps this refers to his
Discourse on the Evidence of the American Indians Being the Descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel (1837) in which he predicted that "Syria will revert to the Jewish nation by purchase." Actually, I'm not sure about his preceding Kalischer. It seems that he must already have had Eretz Yisrael on his mind, as he famously discussed the question of offering the Korban Pesach with his
rebbe Rabbi Akiva Eger, who died in 1838. However, his writings on the subject were not published until over 60 years later (assuming, as I am, that his
Drishas Zion's first edition was the 1899 one on hebrewbooks.org; even if it isn't, it is not listed in Ben Jacob's
Ozar He-Seforim, 1880 edition). So Noah may well have been the first, or among the first, Jews to publish about this, although clearly in the 1830s some Jews had already begun thinking about it, Rabbi Kalischer included. As for Pinsker, he was only born in 1821.
I'd been wanting to post the following for awhile, but now seems the right moment. The following is a passage in volume 2. of
David Hartley's Observations on Man, his Frame, his Duty, and his Expectations (1749):
Most interesting to me is his observation (or fantasy?) that the Jews around the world can speak and write "the Rabbinical Hebrew" and therefore will be well-suited to joining together from around the world.
