Grandfather Simon Loeb Herzl "had his hands on" one of the first copies of Alkalai's 1857 work prescribing the "return of the Jews to the Holy Land and renewed glory of Jerusalem."

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.

[2][3] 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.

[1] 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).

[1] 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 in Frankfurt (Oder) in 1860 by Chaim Lorje.

[7] Although Alkalai and others, such as Rabbi Zvi Hirsch Kalischer, put much energy into promoting its goals, the association couldn't reach any tangible results and soon dispersed.