a return to the roots: the restoration of Hebrew as the Jewish national language, the recovery of land of Israel by purchasing it much like Abraham did with the cave and field of Machpelah in Hebron, and agriculture as the basis for renewed Jewish settlement. For practical reasons and in spite of being a traditionalist who opposed Reform Judaism, Alkalai attempted to achieve national unity. Eventually Zionism would apply several of Alkalai's principles, such as the revival of Hebrew, the purchase of land, the pursuit of agricultural labour (though motivated by a "return to the land" of the Jews, seen as alienated from manual work, nature, and their ancestral land, rather than just as a means of immigrant integration and sustenance), and a political effort towards receiving support from the world powers, and for uniting all Jews behind Zionist ideals. Apart from creating an impressive literary output, Alkalai also toured Western Europe in 1851–1852, including Great Britain, and spread his message among local communities. The success was small among fellow Jews, not least due to other rabbis who considered his idea of human acts constituting a catalyst for the coming of the Messiah as heretical, but British Christian Zionists helped him found a short-lived colonisation society. His work, Goral la-Adonai (A Lot for the Lord), published in Vienna in 1857, is a treatise on the restoration of the Jews to their ancestral homeland, and suggests methods for the betterment of conditions in the Land of Israel. After a somewhat able homiletical discussion of the Messianic problem, in which he shows considerable knowledge of the traditional writers, Alkalai suggests the formation of a joint-stock company, such as a steamship or railroad trust, whose endeavor it should be to induce the Ottoman sultan to cede Land of Israel to the Jews as a tributary country, on a plan similar to that on which the Danubian Principalities were governed. To this suggestion are appended the commendations of numerous Jewish scholars of various schools of thought. The problem of the restoration of Palestine to the Jews was also discussed by Alkalai in Shema' Yisrael (Hear, O Israel), 1861 or 1862, and in Harbinger of Good Tidings (compare Jewish Chronicle, 1857, p. 1198, where his name is spelled Alkali). Alkalai joined the first Jewish organisation for the agricultural settlement of the Land of Israel, the Kolonisations-Verein für Palästina (Association for the Colonisation of Palestine), established