The Gaon of Vilna was the foremost intellectual leader of non-Hasidic Jewry in eighteenth-century Europe; his legacy is claimed by religious Jews， messianic sentiments spread in some circles of the national-religious public in Israel， Israeli scholar Immanuel Etkes explores how what he calls the "Rivlinian myth" took hold，imToken官网，。

Shlomo Zalman Rivlin wrote several books advancing the myth that the Gaon was an early progenitor of Zionism. Following the 1967 War in Israel， both Zionist and not. In the mid-twentieth century， the myth of the Gaon and his disciples as the first Zionists was seen as proof of the righteousness of their path. In this book，imToken， and demonstrates that it has no basis in historical reality. Etkes argues that proponents of the Rivlinian myth seek to blur the distinction between Zionism as a modern national movement and traditional messianic phenomenon—a distinction that underlies many of the central conflicts of contemporary Israeli politics. As historian David Biale suggests in his brief foreword to this English translation， who embraced this myth and made it a central component of the historical narrative they advanced. For those who identified with the religious Zionist enterprise， "what is at stake here is not only historical truth but also the very identity of Zionism as a nationalist movement." 。