Against this picture of reality, modernity dawned for the Jew. The outside world impinged on this picture, wielding a fascination for the many Jews who wished to throw off a complete subordination to the Rabbinic agenda or, at least, to reinterpret that Rabbinic agenda in terms of a more physical reality.

The Haskalah movement (usually translated as the Jewish Enlightenment), which developed in the late 18th century in "Galicia" (Lithuania, Germany, etc.), introduced change and new perspectives to many aspects of Jewish life, bringing down the barriers between Jewish attitudes and the attitudes developing in the outside world as it introduced general education into the Jewish world and Jews into the wider world outside the community http://www.us-israel.org/jsource/Judaism/Haskalah.html .

One of the apparent outcomes was a new consciousness of the physicality of the Jew in many circles, especially among young people. The circulating wisdom was that the ideal of book learning should not always repress part of the Jew physicality's. (Note: the discussion about the issue was carried out almost totally by and for men.) While book learning was not necessarily wrong, it should be one part of a rounded personality.

Many eras have produced new models of the desirable human being for a particular society or culture. Where the Renaissance produced a new model of an ideal all-round “Renaissance man” for a European audience, the Haskalah began a similar process for the Jew, and laid the basis for the reclamation of the physical Jew.

In retrospect, this may be interpreted as a revolution of major proportions for Jews. It proposed and crafted a new model of an ideal Jew, one that would later appeal to many youngsters, especially in the mid- to late nineteenth century. This model also legitimised – and even encouraged – physical self-expression: not as an escape from Jewishness but, rather, as an expression of it. It would be one of the factors that would underlie – and enable – Zionism to emerge.

It was not, however, that there were no Jews who expressed their physicality up to this point in time, but rather that these occupations and their practitioners had previously been perceived as inferior, to large extent. Jewish workers – carters, draymen, craftsmen, farmers and the like – existed everywhere in the Jewish world. However, they were considered the simple (“proste” in Yiddish) Jews: coarse unrefined Jews, second class Jews who were never a model for Jewish life.

It was, however, felt that a Jew should aspire to something better – and that something better was to be a scholar. Scholars had thus ruled the Jewish world almost unchallenged for generations, in both image and status.

With this change, other models began to emerge. One was that of the physical Jew, which was liberated by the Haskalah movement, with its search in Biblical and post-Biblical times for some of its models, and found its place in modern history – on the centre-stage.

Contrary to popular thought, this change in attitude was not a product of Zionism - but a precursor of it. Some time before the emergence of Jewish nationalism, ideologists of the Haskalah can be found praising the idea of physical labour.

Here for example is, the important Eastern European Maskil (proponent of Haskalah), Isaac Baer Levinson, writing in 1828 (also known as the "Russian Mendelssohn").

Why are we so involved in trade and commerce – men and women, great and small, rich and poor? Why should we not march in the footsteps of our ancestors and work the land? Why have we grown tired of it and turned away from it – so that today we have no farmers or grape growers or ploughmen? Such work was never scorned or looked down upon in the distant past. The opposite is true – it was considered respected work – in fact, the most respected, since it gave birth to the means of life itself.

The ideal of the working, productive Jew, the sweating, labouring, physical Jew, thus emerged into the light of day through the Haskalah.

However, two post-Haskalah Jewish movements brought this model to its zenith: Jewish socialism and Zionism, with radically different aims.