return to the Promised Land. His Kabbalistic view made him specifically assert that the year 1840 was the Year of Redemption, which was not a single year, but "a century, from this day until 1939", representing the "days of the Messiah". Unless powerful practical steps were taken, this opportunity would be lost, and the next extended "year" starting in 1940 would be one of great hardship when "with an outpouring of wrath will gather our dispersed". The outcome - the return to the Promised Land - would be the same, but under much harsher circumstances. Political proto-Zionism Alkalai's began by writing in Ladino, which limited his outreach to the rather small European Sephardic community. Only later did he adopt the much wider understood Hebrew language, and he only intensified his political work after the age of 60, at a time when a wider audience seemed to be ready to accept his ideas. In his Shalom Yerushalayim (The Peace of Jerusalem), 1840, he replies to those who attacked his book, Darkhei No'am (The Pleasant Paths), which treated of the duty of tithes. Another work, Minchat Yehudah (The Offering of Judah), Vienna, 1843, is a panegyric on Montefiore and Crémieux, who had rescued the Jews of Damascus from a blood libel accusation. The 1840 Damascus Affair reassured Alkalai that the Jews needed a land of their own to act as a safe haven, but at the same time the positive effects of the intervention by the European powers and by a united front of European Jewish notables also convinced him about the usefulness of foreign support to the success of such an enterprise. In Raglei mevasser he specifically wrote that "The salvation of Israel lies in addressing to the kings of the earth a general request for the welfare of our nation and our holy cities, and for our return in repentance to the house of our mother... our salvation will come rapidly from the kings of the earth." His plan called for the creation of a representative "Assembly of Jewish Notables" who would advocate the case of a Jewish return to the Land of Israel, and for the settlement of the land using funds collected from Jewish communities in form of a tithe, a tenth of one's income, a practice called halukka and already used for supporting the religious groups inhabiting the Jewish Four Holy Cities. In Minchat Yehudah Alkalai proposes