Zionism

History

Anti-Zionism and non-Zionism

Achievements and prospects

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Zionism may be summarily defined as the Jewish nationalist movement whose endeavors to solve the “Jewish problem” led to the establishment of the “Jewish state” of Israel.

The aims of Zionism were those of many nationalist liberation movements: to revive a national language (Hebrew or Yiddish) and culture; to repossess and develop the resources of the national territory; and to achieve sovereignty for a national state. But the nation to be liberated lived in exile from its ancestral home, with its members scattered all over the globe. Accordingly, Zionist objectives also included removing Jews from the countries of their dispersion and colonizing them in Zion, the ancient homeland.

Upon the successful execution of its program, Zionism anticipated that anti-Semitism, rooted according to Zionist theory in Jewish homelessness, would disappear. The Jews remaining in the Diaspora would be reduced to a number susceptible of assimilation (Herzl [1894-1904] 1955, pp. 241-242). Another theory held that a free Jewish community in Zion, not dominated by the milieu of the Gentile majority, would unfold the full potentialities of the Jewish historic individuality. It would produce a national cultural revival and advanced social institutions of universal significance, whose influence would enable Diaspora Jewries to sustain their collective existence even under modern conditions of equal citizenship and acculturation tending to dissolve their identity.

Thus, like other national liberation movements, Zionism developed a rationale that was Utopian, or even messianic, in tone. But its strategic situation also dictated a tactical approach of pragmatic reasonableness.

Palestine in the nineteenth century was neither controlled nor in any large measure occupied by Jews. Zionism could not hope to negotiate its aims unless it defined them in a way compatible with the interests of the suzerain power, Turkey, and other powers concerned with the Eastern Question. Hence, at the first Zionist Congress in Basle, 1897, Theodor Herzl, 1860-1904, obtained a resolution demanding not a “Jewish state” but an “oeffentlich-rechtlich gesicherte Heimstaette” a term subsequently translated in the Balfour Declaration of November 2, 1917, by the vague expression “national home.”

The Zionist position in the Jewish community was equally weak. Unlike other nationalist liberation movements, which could appeal to massive and powerful popular resentments focused on a single, concrete foreign oppressor so that all ideological opposition was often swept out of the field, Zionism was only one of many rival Jewish ideologies (Halpern 1961, pp. 22-23). Moreover, it was divided by a wide diversity of internal factions. The objectives it could agree on had to be compromises, capable of uniting rival Zionist parties on a common denominator and attracting essential support from the non-Zionists in the Jewish community. Hence, the broad formulas of the 1897 program and of the statute of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, formed in 1929.

History

The idea that the Jewish position in the Gentile world presented a problem to be rationally solved, one of the basic Zionist principles, first became current in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. A Jewish movement to achieve this solution, beginning in western Europe in the late eighteenth century, produced campaigns for enlightenment and general humane culture among Jews; for their civic emancipation; and eventually for religious reform, discarding many traditional practices and beliefs. In Russia, the pogroms and repressive laws of the 1880s thoroughly disillusioned some Jewish intellectuals who until then had favored reforms similar to those advocated by their western European counterparts. They turned in revulsion and humiliation against the Western principle of accommodating to a general humanism and insisted that the Jews themselves, and not benevolent Gentiles, must actively and militantly solve their own problem—and solve it by returning to their own sources. These new “Lovers of Zion” (Hovevei-Zion) dedicated themselves not to the aim of emancipation but to the counterposed aim of “auto-emancipation,” a slogan provided by the title of an 1882 brochure written by Leo Pinsker, 1821-1891, a physician who in 1884 became the chosen leader of the movement.

In spite of ideological opposition, the Hovevei-Zion were compelled to cooperate with Western Jews. Since the 1840s the emancipated and enlightened Western Jewish community—including many who no longer believed in redemption in Zion —had introduced rational objectives and methods into the traditional support extended by the Diaspora to pious Jews in Palestine. At first, outstanding individuals like the British Sir Moses Montefiore, 1784-1885, and, since 1860, a major French-led organization, the Alliance Israèlite Universelle, had sought to obtain political and legal security for the Jewish settlement, to provide vocational training and secular culture, and to place Jews on farm-holdings, instead of maintaining a community in Palestine almost exclusively devoted to prayer, study, and penance (Sokolow 1919, vol. 1, pp. 115-120, 176-183). Dr. Pinsker, like Theodor Herzl after him, found it natural to appeal to such Jewish benefactors for support in their projected work in Palestine, even though it was conceived in a different spirit. The Hovevei-Zion, based on a poor membership and not permitted to work freely under Russian law, were rebuffed in their attempt to obtain political concessions from the Sublime Porte for colonization and checked in their spontaneous immigration to Palestine by legal and administrative obstacles swiftly set up against European Jews by the Turks. They were driven back on slow, more or less surreptitious methods of colonization and had to rely for political and financial support on Western philanthropists, notably Baron Edmond de Rothschild, 1845-1934. The consequence was the emergence of a faction in the movement, led by the writer Ahad Ha’am, 1856-1927, which severely criticized Rothschild paternalism and, above all, the settlers’ dependency in all those spheres—economic, cultural, communal— where the Zionist ideal had hoped to build a nucleus of national independence in Palestine.

The positive doctrine of this group centered on the desire of disillusioned eastern European intellectuals to recapture traditional attitudes and cultural motifs that Western modernists had abandoned. Against the Reform thesis that the Jewish dispersion was a divine mission, not a penance, they declared that the exile of the Jews was a fact. Against the liberal notion of civic emancipation as the Messianic redemption of the Jews, they reasserted the restoration to Zion as the solution of the Jewish problem. As a result the young Zionist intellectuals were welcomed back into the fold by many traditionalists—and the new Zionist movement was constituted as much by the latter as by the former.

The seeds of difference were inherent in this union. Traditionalist Jews who became Hovevei-Zion soon began to demand that the prodigal sons make their return complete by submitting fully to the yoke of tradition. The new Zionists, although penitents, rather like the Russian Slavophile radicals who were their contemporaries, were not ready to abandon modernistic and rational standards because of their rebellion against Western values. They saw their Jewish situation not as a divinely decreed election and a penance to be borne but as a social historical problem that urgently required a rational solution. They became lovers of Zion, of the Hebrew language, and of the tradition but wished to free all of these values from the dead hand of sacramentalism. In consequence, the Hovevei-Zion movement in Russia developed traditionalist and modernist factions. The former re-emerged, at a later date, as a distinct party called the Mizrachi in the World Zionist Organization created by Theodor Herzl. The modernist school worked toward the ends of a “cultural Zionism,” seeking a secular revival of the Hebrew language and culture and of an active national will and consensus. While cultural Zionism did not continue as an organized faction after the Hovevei-Zion were absorbed by the World Zionist Organization, it was a pervasive influence thereafter in the movement, especially in the “practical Zionist” faction.

Theodor Herzl entered the Zionist movement as a sharp critic of colonization in Palestine, as conducted by Baron de Rothschild and the Hovevei Zion together. He developed in his 1896 booklet Der Judenstaat, and in his conduct of the World Zionist Organization from 1897 to his death in 1904, the doctrine of “political Zionism.” As conceived by him, and his successors and supporters Max Nordau, 1849-1923, and David Wolffsohn, 1856-1914, and, in a later generation, the self-styled “Herzlian” Zionists led by Vladimir Jabotinsky, 1880-1940, the Zionist strategy must concentrate on achieving adequate political conditions for its nationalist aim before beginning other subsidiary activities, such as colonization. An opposing faction, generally called the “practical Zionists” and led after World War i by Chaim Weizmann, 1874-1952, insisted that other nationalist aims, such as the cultural revival and continuing resettlement in Palestine, must be pursued simultaneously with the Zionist diplomatic campaign. Indeed, achievement of the nationalist political goals, they felt, would be most effectively advanced by building up the Jewish settlement in Palestine and thus adding the rights of occupation to the rights of historic connection and present Diaspora needs to bolster the Zionist claim.

Until the death of Herzl in 1904, the views of political Zionism prevailed. Herzl also maintained an entente with the religious Zionists, restricting at the congress sessions discussion of projects to revive a secular Hebraic culture because of their objection. The failure of Herzl’s diplomatic campaign for a charter to resettle Zion frustrated the movement; and his one major success—the British proposals in 1903 to resettle Jews not in Palestine or its environs but in east Africa—split it. After the definitive rejection of this proposal, some Zionists, led by Israel Zangwill, 1864-1926, left the organization to form their own Jewish Territorialist Organization. Within the Zionist organization the practical Zionists grew increasingly strong, until they took over the leadership fully in 1911. The new policy that was initiated strengthened the tendency, already marked since 1908, to pursue the colonization of Palestine under existing political conditions, setting aside the quest for a charter (Boehm 1935-1937).

It also introduced new stress on the nationalist cultural revival. As a side effect, some religious Zionists left the congress and joined with earlier anti-Zionists in Orthodox Jewry to form a new ultra-Orthodox world organization, Agudat Israel. The Mizrachi who remained Zionists developed a set of minimum demands, requiring respect for tradition in general Zionist facilities and support for autonomous religious cultural activities by Mizrachi paralleling any general cultural activity. Granted this, they proposed to fight for acceptance of Jewish tradition in Orthodox interpretation as binding on all Zionists and, ultimately, as constitutional in the Jewish state.

At the outbreak of World War i, any uniform policy of an international organization divided between the warring nations became virtually impossible. Leading Zionists in the German headquarters of the organization and in England pursued Zionist diplomacy independently in a form consonant with the war aims of their respective countries. Major responsibility was vested in new Zionist leaders residing in neutral countries, notably Louis D. Brandeis, 1856-1941. Toward the end of the war the practical Zionist Chaim Weizmann, aided by Nahum Sokolow, 1859-1936, secured from Britain the Balfour Declaration of November 2, 1917, and parallel statements from Britain’s allies (Stein 1961). This declaration of sympathy for Zionist aspirations, with its pledge to facilitate the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine, was embodied in the San Remo agreement of April 26, 1920, assigning Palestine as a mandate territory to Britain, and also in the mandate instrument approved by the Council of the League of Nations on July 24, 1922.

The Balfour Declaration and the mandate represented in form the charter which Herzl’s diplomacy had sought in vain, but in practice it did not make possible the orderly, relatively rapid mass transfer of Jews to Palestine that Herzl had envisaged. Consequently, Herzlian Zionists like Max Nordau and Vladimir Jabotinsky regarded the mandate instrument as inadequate for Zionist purposes and called for political action to obtain more precise commitments toward the ultimate creation of a Jewish state. Nordau demanded in 1920 the immediate transfer to Palestine of enough Jewish immigrants to form a Jewish majority.

A diametrically opposed view was pressed in 1920 by Justice Brandeis. He regarded the diplomatic phase of Zionist history as closed with the San Remo treaty. The world Zionist organization should resolve itself into a federation of philanthropic societies, each with autonomy in its own country, and a central executive agency devoted chiefly to practical colonization. The latter body should be made up not of political leaders but of technicians and administrators, not necessarily committed to the whole Zionist doctrine but ready to work under the conditions laid down in the mandate for developing the Jewish national home.

Chaim Weizmann, who succeeded in winning control of the movement, followed a line which, in the Zionist congress of 1907, he had defined as “synthetic” (Weizmann 1949, p. 157). He accepted the existing legal framework of the mandate and pursued practical work under its terms. However, far from allowing the political functions of the world Zionist organization to lapse, he developed and tightened them in the running battle with the mandatary over the precise meaning of the mandate instrument. The co-option of experts and enlistment of supporters from among non-Zionist Jews, suggested by Brandeis, was carried out by Weizmann through the Jewish Agency for Palestine, formed in 1929 in agreement with such men as Louis Marshall, 1856-1929, and Felix Warburg, 1871-1937. Weizmann’s immigration and colonization policy was one of gradualism not merely because Winston Churchill in a 1922 white paper had imposed upon Jewish labor immigration into Palestine the limit of “economic absorptive capacity” but also because such an approach was in accord with his own beliefs, as a disciple of the prudent Ahad Ha’am.

After an initial period of opposition, the labor Zionist factions became Weizmann’s reliable and consistent allies in this strategy and finally the dominant force in the coalition. They concentrated on what they regarded as the primary, critical task both of Zionist and Jewish socialist strategy: to create in Zion a Jewish farmer-worker class and thus eliminate the fundamental cause of the dependency of the Jewish people in the Diaspora—their lopsided, “unproductive” occupational distribution.

Although firmly united by a strong workers’ federation with unusually wide powers and functions, labor Zionist factions differed on numerous issues and were organized and acted independently. Most prominent politically were the three major federations of collective settlements or kibbutzim (“communes”), which had the greatest immediate influence on labor immigrants. They differed not only in their plans of village organization but also in their attitudes toward the second and third socialist internationals, the proper Zionist policies vis-a-vis the Arabs, and the definition of the ultimate Zionist aim.

The question of the final political status of Palestine became increasingly acute. Arab riots of increasing violence and magnitude broke out in 1920, 1921, and 1929, culminating in the outright revolt of 1936-1939. Owing also to mounting pressure from the emerging Rome-Berlin Axis, Britain sought to gain Arab support, or at least mitigate Arab hostility, by an increasingly anti-Zionist interpretation of its obligations as mandatary. A White Paper in 1939 proposed to freeze the Jewish community at the one-third proportion of the Palestine population which it had virtually reached; and in the following year land regulations banned or rigorously restricted Jewish land purchase in all but a tiny part of Palestine. At this time Nazi oppression had made the Jewish refugee problem unbearably acute and the omens of the deliberate extermination of European Jewry were becoming manifest.

The pressure to redefine Zionist policy became overwhelming. Some left wing and pacifist Zionists favored a binational Arab-Jewish state, with a provisional limit of 40 per cent of Jews in the population and additional immigration to be permitted by majority decision. Jabotinsky’s Revisionist group wanted a militant Zionist policy demanding a Jewish majority in the whole mandate territory, including Transjordan, which had been excluded from the Jewish national home area by Churchill’s 1922 White Paper. The Irgun Zvai Leumi and the “Stern group” arose as more or less autonomous Revisionist paramilitary formations, and the latter, even during the war against the Axis, demanded an immediate Jewish uprising against the British. Non-Zionists associated with the Jewish Agency proposed to restore the original criterion of economic absorptive capacity as the sole principle governing Jewish immigration. The dominant group among Zionists, headed by the labor leader David Ben-Gurion, opposed an outright Jewish revolt against the mandate itself, but it undertook active resistance to the restrictions on Jewish immigration. Opposing both binationalism and a demand for a Jewish state on both sides of the Jordan, as well as mere restoration of the status quo ante the 1939 White Paper, it was prepared to consider solving the Palestine problem by partition.

The world war was victoriously concluded and a Labour government came to power in Britain, but the 1939 White Paper policy was not rescinded. The limited resistance of the major Zionist paramilitary force, the Jewish Agency-controlled Haganah, escalated into a phase of attacks on government installations and, for a period, was combined in a joint assault with the two Revisionist-oriented bands. British repressive measures, directed both at the armed Zionist resistance and the refugee ships that sought to run the British blockade, raised violence to such a pitch that recourse to outside arbiters was essential. Beginning with an attempt to resolve the issue by joint action with the United States, through an Anglo-American Inquiry Committee in 1946, England was forced to refer the Palestine problem to the United Nations.

A United Nations Special Committee on Palestine turned in a majority proposal for the partition of Palestine into Arab and Jewish states, with a UN-supervised economic union between them and with UN administration of an internationalized corpus separatum including Jerusalem and Bethlehem. With certain revisions this proposal was passed by the UN General Assembly on November 29, 1947. Accepted by the Jews of Palestine, it was rejected by the Arabs and immediately opposed with violence. The British refused to aid the implementation of the UN resolution in any way and made haste to leave the country. The fighting, restricted in the final months of the mandate to areas no longer garrisoned by British troops or essential to their departure, extended to the whole land after the British withdrawal on May 15, 1948, and, with the invasion by regular Arab armies from across four frontiers, turned into a full-scale war. UN action availed only to interrupt the hostilities with ill-observed truces, until the growing Jewish strength forced the Arab states to enter into armistice negotiations.

Thus the state of Israel, proclaimed on May 14, 1948, as the British departed and immediately recognized by the United States and the Soviet Union, maintained its integrity in war and secured its present boundaries under armistice agreements. In this way and to this degree were the political aspirations of Zionism realized.

Anti-Zionism and non-Zionism

The Zionist idea had ideological opponents in the Jewish community even before it crystallized in an organized movement and even after it culminated in the creation of Israel. But the anti-Zionist groups were always opposed to one another in many crucial attitudes where one or another such group found itself in agreement with the Zionists. This led to parallel efforts toward similar goals or to cooperation in a common task between Zionists and some of their ideological foes. Those anti-Zionists who shared in the major practical Zionist activities in Palestine identified themselves (at least for the duration of that effort) as “non-Zionists” (Halpern 1961, chapters 3-7).

Opposition to the idea of nationalism as a solution to the Jewish problem dominated Western Jewry for a century before Zionism arose. It was argued that only illiberal enemies of freedom and equality still believed that Jews were a nation or that Jews hoped to see a Davidic kingdom restored in Zion. On the other hand, long before Zionism, Western Jewish organizations had devoted themselves to what became characteristic Zionist concerns: aid to Jewish emigration from eastern Europe and other trouble spots, general and vocational education, and support of the growing Jewish community in Palestine. Cooperation in such projects began in the 1880s, after the rise of Zionism, with the non-Zionist sponsors holding the main responsibility and control; but the position was reversed after the mandate became effective. Alternating with long periods of cooperation were episodes of ideological conflict—in 1897, from 1914 to 1917, and intermittently from 1937 to 1947—when major political issues arose, evoking sharper definitions of Zionist demands and, in reaction, more elaborate defenses of anti-Zionist views by erstwhile non-Zionists, among others.

Only a minor group of privileged Jews, relatively detached from the main community, represented the type of Western anti-Zionist in eastern Europe. Traditionalist Jews, who dominated the communal consensus until late in the nineteenth century, continuously supported the settlement of some Jews in Palestine as a religious duty; but, long before Zionism, they considered sacrilegious and pseudomessianic any resettlement of Palestine in a deliberate plan to hasten the end of the Exile—let alone a rational secular design to solve the Jewish problem. In 1911 traditionalist anti-Zionism achieved a modern form of organization through the founding of Agudat Israel.

Socialist, radical anti-Zionism arose as a significant force in eastern Europe more or less simultaneously with Zionism. It condemned the plan to solve the Jewish problem by immigration to Palestine as desertion from the barricades where the battle to solve the whole social problem, and the Jewish problem as part of it, would be fought— eastern Europe. In 1897, the year the World Zionist Organization was founded, the Bund (General Jewish Workers’ Union in Poland and Lithuania) was established.

Both radical anti-Zionism and traditional eastern European anti-Zionism were thus primarily opposed to the very aspect of Zionism which made cooperation in western Europe possible: the Zionist practical endeavors in Palestine. On the other hand, they shared in general the Zionist view that Jews were not a mere denomination but an ethnic, cultural group in Europe. Accordingly, eastern European Zionist and anti-Zionist Jewish organizations worked on parallel lines to promote Jewish languages and culture, each in its favored mode, and occasionally joined in common struggle for the political prerequisites to all their aims (Vlavianos & Gross 1954).

In the years following World War i, opportunities open to Jewish migrants were sharply reduced by the American immigration acts, while nationalist and anti-Semitic pressures against the Jews reached unprecedented heights of ferocity. Pales tine became the pre-eminent refuge legally assigned and, until 1939, open with the least onerous restrictions for Jews. The extensive sympathy this won for the national home project from Jews of widely different ideologies was converted by the catastrophes of the war period into organized, institutional support of the community as a whole (Halperin 1961).

These circumstances made the major prewar anti-Zionist organizations moderate the substance and tone of their opposition. The Bund’s conception of Jews as a national cultural entity had focused primarily on Poland and Lithuania, and the destruction of the bulk of eastern European Jewry destroyed basic assumptions of their ideology. The Bund survives as a minor group devoted to Yiddish culture throughout world Jewry; and it accepts Israel, while criticizing some of its policies from an internationalist, socialist point of view. The main body of Agudat Israel gave up its opposition in principle to the creation of a Jewish state during World War II. Like Mizrachi, it now works within Israel’s political system, trying to bring it fully under traditional religious law.

Two small organizations, the ultra-Orthodox Natorei Karta (“wardens of the city”) of Jerusalem and the American Council for Judaism, Inc., became prominent during and since World War II because of their militant, irreconcilable anti-Zionism. The Natorei Karta, while living in Israel, refuse on religious grounds to recognize the authority of the state. The American Council for Judaism, Inc., alleges that Israel in conjunction with the World Zionist Organization seeks, by constituting a form of political allegiance for all Jews, to confuse the sharp line of distinction which, they argue, separates Jewish religious adherence from any ethnic bond. Both organizations stand outside the Jewish consensus and in defiance of it. Within the consensus, the Zionist achievement of a Jewish state has blurred the differences between ideological Zionism and non-Zionism, since the organized Jewish community as a whole, without reference to these labels, extends moral and material support to Israel.

Achievements and prospects

Israel is not only the specific realization of Zionist political aims, but its culture, economy, and social structure bear clear traces of their origins in the ideologies of Zionist factions. The revival of the Hebrew language, the most generally supported aim of Zionism, owes a particular debt to the school of cultural Zionists. Israel’s labor settlements, its producers’ cooperatives, and its broad and powerful labor federation are an outgrowth of labor Zionism. The Mizrachi movement has a dominant influence over the religious courts and chief rabbinate, which act in the tradition of religious Zionism.

The creation of the Jewish state, a triumph of the policy of the World Zionist Organization, relieved the organization of some of its major functions, but Zionist aims are such that the creation of a state does not completely fulfill them. If all Jews who cannot or would not live in Diaspora countries are to be brought to Zion—as Zionist doctrine requires—the state itself must be a means to this end. This Zionist task is shared by Diaspora Jews through their contributions to the Jewish Agency and membership in the World Zionist Organization, organizations that still play a major role in immigrant resettlement and land reclamation in Israel.

Another continuing responsibility is based on the Zionist prediction that the Jewish problem would be solved through the return to Zion. The Zionist movement feels a particular responsibility to stimulate or sponsor educational activities by which Diaspora Jewish communities can share the values created by the revived Hebrew culture in Israel. Thus, Jewish nationalism remains, in a restricted sphere of activities, a continuing organized force in the Diaspora after the rise of the state of Israel.

Ben Halpern

[See alsoanti-semitism; Judaism; Nationalism; near eastern society, article onisrael; social movements.]

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Boehm, Adolf 1935-1937 Die Zionistische Bewegung. 2 vols. Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag.

Brandeis, Louis D. 1942 Brandeis on Zionism: A Collection of Addresses and Statements. Washington: Zionist Organization of America.

Cohen, Israel (1945) 1946 The Zionist Movement. Edited and revised, with a supplementary chapter on “Zionism in the United States,” by Bernard G. Richards. New York: Zionist Organization of America.

Esco Foundation FOR PALESTINE, Inc. 1947 Palestine: A Study of Jewish, Arab and British Policies. 2 vols. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press.

Halperin, Samuel 1961 The Political World of American Zionism. Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press.

Halpern, Ben 1961 The Idea of the Jewish State. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press.

Hertzberg, Arthur (editor) (1959) 1964 The Zionist Idea: A Historical Analysis and Reader. Cleveland: World.

Herzl, Theodor (1894-1904) 1955 Theodor Herzl: A Portrait for This Age. Edited with an introduction by Ludwig Lewisohn and a preface by David Ben-Gurion. Cleveland: World. → A selection of Herzl’s writings.

Herzl, Theodor (1895-1904) 1960 The Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl. 5 vols. New York: Herzl Press. → First published in German. The English edition con tains material left out of the original German collection.

Nordau, Max 1941 Max Nordau to His People. New York: Scopus.

Pinsker, Leo S. (1882-1886) 1944 Road to Freedom: Writings and Addresses. With an introduction by B. Netanyahu. New York: Scopus. → First published in German.

Sokolow, Nahom 1919 History of Zionism: 1600-1918. 2 vols. London: Longmans.

Stein, Leonard J. 1961 The Balfour Declaration. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Vlavianos, Basil J.; and Gross, Feliks (editors) 1954 Struggle for Tomorrow: Modern Political Ideologies of the Jewish People. New York: Arts.

Weizmann, Chaim 1949 Trial and Error: The Autobiography of Chaim Weizmann. New York: Harper.

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).

ZIONISM

ZIONISM. The emergence of modern political Zionism in the late nineteenth century did not inspire great enthusiasm on American shores. German American Jews, who numbered about 200,000 at the time Theodore Herzl convened the First Zionist Congress in 1897, rejected calls for creation of a Jewish state. Reared in the classical Reform movement, they considered the United States

their "New Zion" and feared that Jewish nationalism might compromise their standing as loyal American citizens. At its 1885 Pittsburgh meeting, the Reform movement's Central Conference of American Rabbis declared, "We consider ourselves no longer a nation but a religious community and therefore expect neither a return to Palestine … nor the restoration of any of the laws concerning the Jewish state."

The arrival of over 2 million eastern European Jews between 1880 and 1920 altered the demographic profile of American Jewry and opened new doors for the Zionist movement. Reared in traditional Judaism or in the socialist movements of the Old World, the new arrivals proved more sympathetic to the idea of a Jewish homeland. In 1884a small group of Jews in New York City formed the nation's first Zionist organization, Hoveve Zion (literally the lovers of Zion). By 1898 a number of American Zionist groups merged into the Federation of American Zionists, counting some ten thousand members across the country.

The American Zionist movement enjoyed its most rapid growth under the leadership of the famed attorney and eventual Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis. According to Brandeis, American Jews could support the Zionist cause without sacrificing their status as loyal American citizens. His "Brandeisian synthesis" described the United States in pluralist terms, encouraging ethnic difference and drawing strong parallels between the aspirations of Americans and Zionists. With Brandeis's support, President Woodrow Wilson backed Great Britain's November 1917 Balfour Declaration, which promised a Jewish homeland in Palestine.

For the next twenty-five years the Zionist movement suffered from political infighting, financial difficulties, and an American political culture unsympathetic to its long-term goal. During the 1920s conflicting leadership styles ruined any hope of consensus, while the Great Depression diverted needed dollars from organizational coffers. American isolationism and the rise of domestic anti-Semitism in the 1930s discouraged Jewish leaders from adopting an aggressive Zionist stance.

U.S. entry into World War II and word of Adolf Hitler's "final solution" mobilized American Jews behind the Zionist cause. By 1948 membership in Zionist organizations swelled to 1 million as American Jews from across the denominational spectrum rallied for Jewish statehood. Even the once anti-Zionist Reform movement abandoned its opposition to Zionism during its 1937 rabbinic convention in Columbus, Ohio. A small group of Reform rabbis formed the anti-Zionist American Council for Judaism, but it faded quickly with news of Nazi atrocities.

President Harry S. Truman recognized the state of Israel a mere eleven minutes after the new Jewish state declared its independence in May 1948. While a few American Jews immigrated to Israel in the 1950s and early 1960s, most advanced the Zionist cause with financial contributions to Israel and resisted the call for a physical return to Zion. Philanthropic Zionism dominated the movement for the first twenty years of the postwar period.

At the time of the 1967 Six Day War, American Zionism underwent a fundamental transformation, as many young Jews rejected the humanitarian-based Zionist views of their parents and embraced a form of Jewish nationalism that encouraged aliyah (immigration, literally to rise up). Jewish high school students looked forward to spending a summer in Israel, while undergraduates took advantage of overseas study programs to matriculate at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In the 1990s several Jewish philanthropists endowed the birthright program, promising every North American Jew a free trip to Israel.

In the late twentieth century American Jews took a more active role in domestic Israeli politics, especially around issues of religious pluralism. Both the Conservative and Reform movements established Jerusalem campuses for their respective seminaries and lobbied Israeli government officials for greater recognition of nontraditional forms of Jewish expression. They demanded recognition of their clergy's right to perform weddings and conversions, staged protests at Jerusalem's Western Wall, and sought inclusion on local religious councils.

American immigration to Israel also reflected a fundamental political shift. Between 1967 and 1973 almost sixty thousand American Jews packed their belongings and moved to the Jewish state. Most hailed from nontraditional religious backgrounds and viewed their aliyah as an opportunity to help create an idealistic Jewish homeland. By the 1990s though the number of American immigrants plummeted to fewer than three thousand a year.

Despite their strong support for the state of Israel, American Jews have never considered mass immigration to the Jewish state a viable option. Zionism has remained a minority movement in the United States.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cohen, Naomi W. American Jews and the Zionist Idea. New York: Ktav, 1975.

Halperin, Samuel. The Political World of American Zionism. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1961.

Urofsky, Melvin I. American Zionism from Herzl to the Holocaust. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1975.

MarcDollinger

See alsoIsrael, Relations with ; Jews .

Zionism. International, political, and ideological movement dedicated to restoring Erez Israel to the Jewish people. The desire to return to the land of Israel has been preserved in the liturgy and folk consciousness of the Jews of the diaspora since the time of the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE. Modern political Zionism was first conceived by Theodor Herzl, and the movement was launched at the First Zionist Congress of 1897. Its stated aim was ‘to establish a home for the Jewish people in Palestine secured under public law’. Early Zionism was not supported wholeheartedly by the Jewish community. Many of the Orthodox believed that the return to Zion would only be effected by divine intervention, and that it was wrong for human beings to anticipate divine providence. At the other extreme, members of the Progressive movements were anxious to play down the ethnic and nationalistic aspirations of Judaism and were convinced of their successful future in the countries of the diaspora. Today, Zionist activities are organized under the auspices of the World Zionist Organization which embraces all the various unions, federations, and associations.

Zionism Jewish nationalist movement advocating the return of Jews to the land of Zion (Palestine). Although it represents a desire expressed since the Jewish Diaspora began in the 6th century bc, the modern Zionist movement dates from 1897, when Theodor Herzl established the World Zionist Congress at Basel, Switzerland. In 1917, it secured British approval for its objective in the Balfour Declaration, and Jewish emigration to Palestine increased in the 1920s and 1930s. In 1947, the United Nations voted to partition Palestine between Jews and Arabs, leading to the foundation of the state of Israel.