Zionism

ZIONISM

Balfour and Allenby

At the outbreak of World War I, Palestine lay under the control of the Ottoman Empire. The cherished hopes of the World Zionist Organization (WZO) for a Jewish homeland in Palestine seemed impossible to realize while the Holy Land remained in Muslim hands. But 1914 brought new hope with the British declaration of war on the Ottoman state. Long sympathetic to the Zionist cause (its offer to help procure land in Africa for Jewish settlement had been rejected by the WZO in 1905), Britain now adopted the reclamation of Palestine and its opening for Jewish immigration as an official part of its foreign policy. The Balfour Declaration of November 1917, named for foreign secretary Arthur Balfour, epitomized Britain's stand on Zionism at the time. "His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of that object," the declaration read. When the British general Edmund Allenby captured Jerusalem from the Turks on 8 December 1917, Zionists had reason to celebrate and to believe that they might soon see their dreams realized. Progress turned out to be slow, of course, and the British became bogged down in their efforts to honor another part of the declaration, which pointed out that nothing could be done "which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine." But in the decade of the 1910s as a whole, the Zionist movement was clearly on the rise. Nowhere was this more true than in the United States, where membership in Zionist organizations skyrocketed and leaders of the movement persuaded President Woodrow Wilson, reluctant because the United States had never declared war on Turkey, to express his support for the Balfour Declaration. Suddenly Zionism, which twenty years earlier had failed to attract more than a small minority even of the U.S. Jewish population, was exerting an influence on American foreign policy. The cry for a Jewish homeland in Palestine was clearly being taken up by unprecedented numbers of people in sometimes surprising spheres of society.

COLONEL ROOSEVELT'S MESSAGE TO THE TROOPS

The marriage of Christian ethics to America's democratic principles in justifying America's entry into World War I was illustrated by an article in The New York Times on 17 June 1917. "A message from Theodore Roosevelt to American soldiers in France will be inserted in all Bibles given to the fighters by the New York Bible Society, according to an announcement made yesterday in a plea for funds to buy 100,000 books." Roosevelt's message read thus:

The teachings of the New Testament are foreshadowed in Micah's verse:'What more doth the Lord require of thee than to do justice, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?'

Do justice: and therefore fight valiantly against the armies of Germany and Turkey, for these nations in this crisis stand for the reign of Moloch and Beelzebub on this earth.

Love mercy: treat prisoners well; succor the wounded; treat every woman as if she was your sister; care for the little children, and be tender with the old and helpless.

Walk humbly: you will do so if you study the life and teachings of the Saviour.

May the God of Justice and Mercy have you in his keeping.

Source:

"Colonel's War Texts" New York Times, 17 June 1917, p. 6.

Brandeis

The story of the transformation of American Zionism in the 1910s is largely the story of one man, Boston attorney Louis Dembitz Brandeis. Brandeis took the helm of American Zionism on 30 August 1914, when an "emergency meeting" of the Federation of American Zionists (FAZ) offered him the chairmanship of its Provisional Executive Committee for General Zionist Affairs. The FAZ's immediate concern in August 1914 was to raise funds for the support of Jewish settlers already living in Palestine, who suddenly found themselves cut off from European import and export markets as a result of the Ottoman Empire's alliance with Germany. But Brandeis expanded both the organization's aims and its clout in extraordinary ways. Perhaps no other American Jew was in as favorable a position to influence public policy as was Brandeis; his personal relationship with Wilson led to his appointment as the Supreme Court's first Jewish justice in 1916. Thus, it was Brandeis, along with prominent Reform Jewish rabbi Stephen S. Wise, whose lobbying encouraged Wilson to embrace the Balfour Declaration. But equally important for the cause was Brandeis's ability to increase the appeal of Zionism among America's diverse Jewish population.

Diversity

Conservative Judaism, centered at New York's Jewish Theological Seminary and under the leadership of Solomon Schechter and, later, Mordecai Kaplan, provided the major basis of support for American Zionism. With an understanding of Judaism as what Kaplan would call the "religious civilization of the Jewish people," Conservatives saw the need for a homeland where that civilization could be established independently, providing a center from which Jewish life around the world could draw strength and direction. But with this view the Conservatives stood in stark contrast to the large Reform Jewish population of the United States. Products of the emancipation of Jews from Germany's ghettos in the nineteenth century, Reform Jews had worked hard to erase the stigma so often attached to their religion. Arriving in the United States, they had assimilated quickly and thoroughly into the mainstream Protestant religious culture they found here. English had replaced Hebrew as the language of the synagogue; church schools had been established; and, perhaps most important, the Pittsburgh Platform, a statement of Reform principles issued in 1885, had declared that Judaism was only a religion and not an ethnicity, thus implicitly denying the need for a home for the "people." At the other end of the Jewish spectrum, newly arrived Orthodox Jews from eastern Europe also grappled with the issue of assimilation and the adoption of "American" as an ethnic identity. Already experiencing persecution because of their obvious "foreignness," Orthodox Jews became hesitant to voice their support for a far-off Jewish homeland. It was up to Brandeis to craft a Zionist vision broad enough to draw in all these segments of American Judaism.

The American Synthesis

Brandeis met the challenge, developing the first uniquely American vision for the Jewish homeland. He did this by stressing the compatibility of Zionism with American ideals. American Zionists did not advocate the creation of a Jewish theocracy overseas, Brandeis argued; instead, they merely sought the establishment of a state where worldwide Jewry could enjoy all the benefits of democracy, just as American Jews already knew them. At a convention in June 1918, the FAZ issued a new Pittsburgh platform, expressing its distinctly American vision for the new Palestinian society. The Jewish state, according to this platform, should guarantee "political and civil equality of all inhabitants of Palestine, regardless of race, sex, or faith; equality of opportunity, with public ownership of land, natural resources, and utilities; free public education; the cooperative principle in economic development; and Hebrew as the national language." The retention of the last plank showed the continuing influence of the Conservative understanding of the Jewish people, bound in part by a common language. But the other tenets demonstrated the new attempt to cast the net more widely—equality and liberty, the founding principles of the United States, were included to appeal to Reform Jews, and enough of a hint of socialism was added to attract some of the many Jews who had adopted that political ideology since their arrival in the United States. The results of this Brandeisian synthesis were astounding. The appeal of the new ideas was evidenced in part by the return of Reform rabbi Stephen S. Wise to the fold of Zionism, which he had left in bitter disagreement some years before. The rank and file apparently followed; the FAZ, which could claim only 12,000 members when Brandeis took the helm in 1914, swelled in size to 176,000 by 1919, the year in which it was reorganized as the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA). The restructuring was significant because it introduced individual membership, whereas the FAZ had been a loose alliance of small, local Zionist groups. Brandeis had come up with a simple formula to express his belief that Americanism, Judaism, and Zionism were complementary, rather than conflicting, loyalties. "To be good Americans, we must be better Jews," he argued, "and to be better Jews, we must become Zionists!"

Other Expressions

But the ZOA, powerful as it was by the end of the decade, was not the only voice in the United States for Zionism. In fact, the idea of a Jewish return to Palestine had supporters from such unlikely quarters as premillennialist Protestantism, which saw the reconstitution of the nation of Israel as a crucial element of God's plan for the last days of the world. But within Judaism, the two major expressions of Zionism outside the ZOA were Po'ale Zion and Hadassah. Po'ale Zion represented a wing of Jewish socialism and was known as "Labor Zionism" because of its involvement in the broader struggle for the unionization of American labor. But as a result of its deep political activism and sometimes radical Marxist views, Po'ale Zion ultimately gained little support from either the socialist party or the ZOA, working instead as an independent voice on behalf not only of Palestinian settlers but also of Jewish workers in America. For its part, Hadassah represented the efforts of women's groups, usually local "Daughters of Zion" chapters, to do relief work in Palestine. It came into being through the auspices of Henrietta Szold, who had seen firsthand the lack of medical care available to Jewish settlers in the Holy Land. She returned from her trip there in 1910 and began discussing the settlers' plight with the women in her study circle at a New York synagogue. By 1912 the groundwork had been laid for a national women's Zionist organization. Meetings on 24 February and 7 March 1912 led to the creation of the national group, the Daughters of Zion, and an affiliated New York organization, the Hadassah Chapter of the Daughters of Zion. In 1914 the name of the national organization was changed to Hadassah, the Women's Zionist Organization of America. In early 1914 Hadassah sent its first two nurses to minister to the settlers in Palestine; ultimately it raised the funds and coordinated personnel for a major medical relief effort. Hadassah would also become the single largest Zionist organization in the world, although Szold herself resigned as its president in 1916 to found a similar organization, the American Zionist Medical Unit. By 1919, then, Zionism encompassed the efforts of a broad range of America's Jewish population to realize the deepest principles of Jewish peoplehood and philanthropy, both in Palestine and in the United States.

Sources:

Isidore S. Meyer, ed., Early History of Zionism in America (New York: Arno, 1977);

Ezekiel Rabinowitz, Justice Louis D. Brandeis: The Zionist Chapter of His Life (New York: Philosophical Library, 1968).