Zionism

ZIONISM

Movement for the establishment of an independent state in Palestine for the Jewish people.

Zionism may be seen as a national liberation movement for a Jewish homeland based on a nineteenth-century European political model. It defined Jews as a nation whose collective future depended upon the establishment of a national territorial entity in Eretz Yisrael (in Hebrew, "the land of Israel"), from which most Jews had been dispersed by the Roman Empire at the beginning of the second century c.e. The movement's name was coined by the Viennese Jewish writer Nathan Birnbaum in 1885 and derives from Zion, one of the biblical names for Jerusalem, the focus of worldwide Judaism.

Zionists believed that antisemitism was endemic to the diaspora; thus, the achievement of national and civil rights in host nations, while desirable, was insufficient to secure economic and cultural interests for Jews in the long run. Few Zionists believed that the diaspora would be swept away (as was attempted a century later by Hitler's Nazi Germany), but a Jewish homeland—which would serve as a cultural and political model and as a magnet for its finest sons and daughters—could help to secure a future for Jews.

Foundations of Zionism

Through the centuries of exile, ritual, prayer, and the study of sacred texts preserved for Jews the knowledge that Judaism had developed in Eretz Yisrael and Zion. In nineteenth-century Europe during the Haskalah (the Jewish Enlightenment), revival of the Hebrew language as a nonreligious, literary medium transmitted secular works and secularized versions of sacred histories to assimilated generations losing faith in religion and religious authority. If Zionism were to ensure the survival of the Jewish people, it could do so only by going through the modern European Jewish experience, not by denying it. Zionists were Jews who believed that only in Zion could Jewish culture and the Jewish people be re-established and secure. At that time, however, Zion was located in Palestine, within the Ottoman Empire, and was populated by Arabs under Ottoman jurisdiction.

A "proto-Zionism" had existed in fact before it was fully defined or before the word itself was coined. As a way of helping the indigent and scholarly Jewish populations in Ottoman Palestine, Western European philanthropists such as Edmond de Rothschild and Sir Moses Montefiore proffered aid to projects that later would come to be associated with the Zionist movement—the purchase of land for settlements, farms, and businesses from Ottoman officials and Arab landlords; the building of schools for vocational training; and the opening of medical facilities.

Jewish emigration to Eretz Yisrael also antedated the emergence of a Zionist movement. Jewish religious leaders had always endorsed the idea of living in the Holy Land as a means of discharging religious duties, and had actively promoted the expansion of Jewish communities in Safed, Tiberias, Hebron, and Jerusalem, creating financial mechanisms to meet the immigrants' material needs.

The wave of pogroms that followed the assassination of Russia's Czar Alexander II in 1881 turned an attachment for Zion into an ideology embraced by some of Russia's secular Jewish leaders and intellectuals. Newly promulgated regressive legislation and the resuscitation of antisemitic rhetoric dashed the hopes of those who had believed Russia's polity would evolve into a democracy, with basic rights granted to its population and the ideals of tolerance espoused. Although emigration to the United States and Britain was a popular way of escaping the immediate disabilities imposed by Russian policies, some educated Jews saw that moving to another land would neither end antisemitism nor secure a Jewish future. They argued that only a purposeful immigration with the goal of establishing a Jewish majority in a territory would achieve international respectability for Jewry and help protect Jews everywhere against discrimination. For those who called on Jews to liberate themselves, the Zionist idea supplanted the ideal of assimilation. Zionism was presented as resolving the Jewish problem by normalizing the conditions of Jewish existence.

Development of Zionist Organizations

Although many rabbinical authorities opposed Zionism for its secular and humanistic principles, many rabbis—most notably Samuel Mohilever and Isaac Jacob Reines—welcomed Zionism; they affiliated with Hibbat Zion, the first international Zionist organization to be founded, partly because they reasoned that in Eretz Yisrael a social and cultural environment could be created that was conducive to religious observance.

The Orthodox rabbinate did not, however, establish an entirely harmonious relationship with the secular leadership in Hibbat Zion. Many Orthodox %
rabbis could not abide the dynamics of a political struggle that effected compromises between the demands of Zionism's secular and religious constituencies. Nor were the Orthodox entirely comfortable in an organization that did not acknowledge the primacy of religious law and rabbinic authority. The first nonsecular Zionist group, the Mizrahi, opened its office in 1893, but most rabbis, though comfortable with the nationalist claims of Zionism, were unwilling to accede to Zionist demands to share power and resources in local Jewish communities. As a consequence of the frustrating handicaps under which Hibbat Zion labored in the 1880s and 1890s, Zionism was at an impasse when Theodor Herzl undertook to lead the struggle for a Jewish state.

Unaware of developments in Eastern Europe, Herzl, a Viennese journalist, championed the idea of Jewish nationhood in response to the outbreak of antisemitism in France during the fraudulent espionage trial of Alfred Dreyfus (1894–1895). In 1896 Herzl published Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State), a book that set forth the argument that both the world and the Jews needed a Jewish state. In 1897 Herzl succeeded in drawing together representatives from the local and regional Hibbat Zion organizations in eastern Europe and Jews from western Europe, establishing and becoming president of a new Zionist framework, the World Zionist Organization (WZO). Authorized by the WZO to secure international recognition for Zionist political goals, Herzl pursued in the capitals of Europe and in the Ottoman capital, Istanbul, official sanction for Jewish colonization in Palestine, but his efforts, albeit feverish and intense, were unsuccessful. The Ottoman sultan Abdülhamit II was not persuaded that a larger Jewish population in Palestine was consistent with his imperial political objectives or that such a population would promote economic development.

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Herzl's leadership did broaden the popularity of Zionism in western and eastern Europe and enlarge its Orthodox membership. Herzl focused the activities of the WZO on diplomacy and finances. This approach mobilized the support of a number of Orthodox rabbis concerned with easing the economic hardships in Palestine for eastern European immigrants and hopefuls, as well as with the creation of a hospitable political climate there. By permitting groups to shift the mode of their representation from regional affiliation to ideological, the WZO was also used advantageously by the Orthodox to influence the direction of policies and, for a number of years, to exclude Jewish culture from the scope of Zionist activities.

Zionism's preoccupation with political solutions and stratagems triggered opposition. Against the political orientation associated with the leadership of Hibbat Zion, the writer Ahad Ha-Am argued that the purpose of Zionism ought to be to revive a modern Jewish culture through the medium of the Hebrew language and a renewed interpretation of classic religious texts; a new Jewish state could only be founded with new artifacts of Jewish culture. Cultural Zionist Ahad Ha-Am's insights on the problems besetting the Jewish people and the Zionist movement helped to inspire a group opposing Herzl's leadership and political Zionism—the Democratic Faction. This group, led by the scientist Chaim Weizmann, did not repudiate political methods or consider them insignificant; rather, they insisted that just as legal titles (to land) could facilitate resettlement, so could settlement lead to concrete political gains. Insisting that the structure of the WZO must be reformed to increase popular participation and broaden its agenda, the Democratic Faction defined its own priorities as the investigation of the physical, political, and social conditions of Palestine for purposes of increasing Jewish immigration.

Creating a Jewish community in Palestine was not simply the solution to continuing antisemitism but also the opportunity to establish a whole and vigorous modern Jewish life. In the early years of the twentieth century, efforts to create a youth movement and to popularize Zionism among the young led several Zionist leaders to synthesize socialism with Zionism. No longer would Jews have to choose between socialism (popular in Russia and in the Pale of Settlement) and Zionism. Some Socialist-Zionists promoted a non-Marxist socialism, emphasizing social welfare and justice; others insisted that even the Marxist version of socialism could be combined with Zionism. Branches of the first Labor Zionist party, Poʿalei Zion, founded in 1906, opened in many towns and cities of eastern Europe, attracting many educated Jewish teenagers. Ha-Halutz, the young pioneer farm movement, was nonpartisan and attracted many capable Austro-Hungarian Jewish youth, especially when it was funded by the WZO after World War I.

Before the conclusion of World War I, Zionists were unable to engage openly in mass mobilization in many countries. In the United States and western Europe, where organizations could operate freely, Zionism did not hold the imagination of most immigrants, who were struggling to work their way out of grinding poverty. In Russia, where the majority of Jews presumably felt sympathy with Zionist aims, Zionist activities were hobbled by the Russian Revolution, Soviet dictatorship, and persecution.

Establishment of the Jewish State in Palestine

With the issuance of the Balfour Declaration in 1917 and the Sèvres Treaty of 1920, Britain became formally committed to the establishment in Palestine of a Jewish national home. This gave Zionism its first major political victory. World War I had changed the map of Eastern Europe as well as that of the Middle East, thereby providing Zionists an opportunity to engage in grassroots political organization among previously isolated Jewish communities. Youth groups expanded, and camps were created to offer vocational and Hebrew-language training to prepare Jews for life and work in Palestine.

Throughout its history, the Zionist movement has had to make crucial choices among several options: Eretz Yisrael (Palestine) versus another territory, such as Uganda, Canada, Australia; a national home versus a cultural center for world Jewry; a Jewish nation-state versus a binational state in which Jews and Arabs might share political power; neutrality during World War I versus pro-British cooperation; high political profile versus quiet political lobbying; and uniformity versus diversity in political goals. Each decision was made after great debate during and outside of Zionist congresses, often triggering enmity, hard feelings, and the creation of new splinters and factions. One of the most serious splits occurred when Vladimir (Zeʾev) Jabotinsky left the WZO to create his own Revisionist Zionist movement.

With increasing knowledge of the extent of the Holocaust during World War II, the Zionist movement chose Jewish survival over acquiescence in British restrictions on immigration, which resulted in an anti-British militancy aimed at gaining free entry for Jewish refugees into Palestine from 1944 until 1948. With the establishment of the State of Israel in May 1948, the fulfilment of one of Zionism's goals was endorsed by international consensus—majority support at the United Nations, official recognition by many of the world's nations, and acceptance by most Jews (religious Jews excepted). The Arab and Muslim world remained outside this consensus. Post-1948 Zionism evolved into a movement dedicated to immigration (aliyah) for as many Jews as possible, land purchase for continued settlement, and political and economic support for Israel through institutionalized activity. Despite the recent "post-Zionist" intellectual trend that urges a redefinition of Israel as an inclusive state for all its citizens and detaches it from its special diaspora Jewish connections, many Jews continue to consider themselves Zionists in affirming this connection and the importance of Israel in sustaining their Jewish identity.

see also abdülhamit ii; ahad ha-am; aliyah; antisemitism; diaspora; dreyfus affair; eretz yisrael; ha-halutz; haskalah; herzl, theodor; hibbat zion; holy land; jabotinsky, vladimir zeʾev; jerusalem; labor zionism; mizrahi movement; mohilever, samuel; montefiore, moses; pogrom; rothschild, edmond de; weizmann, chaim; world zionist organization (wzo); zionist commission for palestine; zionist organization of america; zionist revisionist movement.

Bibliography

Avineri, Shlomo. The Making of Modern Zionism: Intellectual Origins of the Jewish State. New York: Basic Books, 1981.

Dowty, Alan. The Jewish State: A Century Later. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.

Halpern, Ben. The Idea of the Jewish state. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969.

Hertzberg, Arthur. The Fate of Zionism: A Secular Future for Israel and Palestine. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2003.

Hertzberg, Arthur, ed. The Zionist Idea: A Historical Analysis and Reader. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1997.

Laqueur, Walter. A History of Zionism: From the French Revolution to the Establishment of the State of Israel. New York: Schocken Books, 2003.

Rubinstein, Amnon. From Herzl to Rabin: The Changing Image of Zionism. New York: Holmes and Meier, 2000.

Sternhell, Zeev. The Founding Myths of Israel: Nationalism, Socialism, and the Making of the Jewish State, translated by David Maisel. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998.

Vital, David. Zionism: The Crucial Phase. Oxford, U.K.: Clarendon Press, 1987; New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.

donna robinson divine
updated by neil caplan