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Israel
Index
Political Zionism was emancipated West European Jewry's
response to the pervasiveness of anti-Semitism and to the failure
of the enlightenment to alter the status of the Jew. Its objective
was the establishment of a Jewish homeland in any available
territory--not necessarily in Palestine--through cooperation with
the Great Powers. Political Zionists viewed the "Jewish problem"
through the eyes of enlightenment rationalism and believed that
European powers would support a Jewish national existence outside
Europe because it would rid them of the Jewish problem. These
Zionists believed that Jews would come en masse to the new entity,
which would be a secular nation modeled after the post-emancipation
European state.
The first Jew to articulate a political Zionist platform was
not a West European but a Russian physician residing in Odessa. A
year after the 1881 pogroms, Leo Pinsker, reflecting the
disappointment of other Jewish maskalim, wrote in a pamphlet
entitled Auto-Emancipation that anti-Semitism was a modern
phenomenon, beyond the reach of any future triumphs of "humanity
and enlightenment." Therefore Jews must organize themselves to find
their own national home wherever possible, not necessarily in their
ancestral home in the Holy Land. Pinsker's work attracted the
attention of Hibbat Tziyyon (Lovers of Zion), an organization
devoted to Hebrew education and national revival. Ignoring
Pinsker's indifference toward the Holy Land, members of Hibbat
Tziyyon took up his call for a territorial solution to the Jewish
problem. Pinsker, who became leader of the movement, obtained funds
from the wealthy Jewish philanthropist, Baron Edmond de Rothschild-
-who was not a Zionist--to support Jewish agricultural settlement
in Palestine at Rishon LeZiyyon, south of Tel Aviv, and Zikhron
Yaaqov, south of Haifa. Although the numbers were meager--only
10,000 settlers by 1891--especially when compared to the large
number of Jews who emigrated to the United States, the First Aliyah
(1882-1903), or immigration, was important because it established
a Jewish bridgehead in Palestine espousing political objectives.
The impetus to the founding of a Zionist organization with
specific goals was provided by Theodor Herzl. Born in Budapest on
May 2, 1860, Herzl grew up in an environment of assimilation. He
was educated in Vienna as a lawyer but instead became a journalist
and playwright. By the early 1890s, he had achieved some
recognition in Vienna and other major European cities. Until that
time, he had only been identified peripherally with Jewish culture
and politics. He was unfamiliar with earlier Zionist writings, and
he noted in his diary that he would not have written his book had
he known the contents of Pinsker's Auto-Emancipation.
While working as Paris correspondent for a Viennese newspaper,
Herzl became aware of the pervasiveness of anti-Semitism in French
society. He saw that emancipation rather than dissipating antiSemitism had exacerbated popular animosity toward the Jews. The
tearing down of the ghetto walls placed Jews in competition with
non-Jews. Moreover, the newly liberated Jew was blamed by much of
non-Jewish French society for the socioeconomic upheaval caused by
both emancipation and accelerated industrialization.
The turning point in Herzl's thinking on the Jewish question
occurred during the 1894 Paris trial of Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish
officer in the French army, on charges of treason (the sale of
military secrets to Germany). Dreyfus was convicted, and although
he was eventually cleared, his career was ruined. The trial and
later exoneration sharply divided French society and unleashed
widespread anti-Semitic demonstrations and riots throughout France.
To Herzl's shock and dismay, many members of the French
intellectual, social, and political elites--precisely those
elements of society into which the upwardly mobile emancipated Jews
wished to be assimilated--were the most vitriolic in their antiSemitic stance.
The Dreyfus affair proved for Herzl, as the 1881 pogroms had
for Pinsker, that Jews would always be an alien element in the
societies in which they resided as long as they remained stateless.
He believed that even if Jewish separateness in religion and social
custom were to disappear, the Jews would continue to be treated as
outsiders.
Herzl put forth his solution to the Jewish problem in Der
Judenstaat (The Jewish State) published in 1896. He
called for the establishment of a Jewish state in any available
territory to which the majority of European Jewry would immigrate.
The new state would be modeled after the postemancipation European
state. Thus, it would be secular in nature, granting no special
place to the Hebrew language, Judaism, or to the ancient Jewish
homeland in Palestine.
Another important element contained in Herzl's concept of a
Jewish state was the enlightenment faith that all men--including
anti-Semites--are basically rational and will work for goals that
they perceive to be in their best interest. He was convinced,
therefore, that the enlightened nations of Europe would support the
Zionist cause to rid their domains of the problem-creating Jews.
Consequently, Herzl actively sought international recognition and
the cooperation of the Great Powers in creating a Jewish state.
Herzl's ideas were not original, his belief that the Great
Powers would cooperate in the Zionist enterprise was naive, and his
indifference to the final location of the Jewish state was far
removed from the desires of the bulk of the Jewish people residing
in the Pale of Settlement. What he accomplished, however, was to
cultivate the first seeds of the Zionist movement and to bestow
upon the movement a mantle of legitimacy. His stature as a
respected Western journalist and his meetings with the pope,
princes of Europe, the German kaiser, and other world figures,
although not successful, propelled the movement into the
international arena. Herzl sparked the hopes and aspirations of the
mass of East European Jewry living under Russian oppression. It was
the oppressed Jewish masses of the Pale, however--with whom Herzl,
the assimilated bourgeois of the West, had so little in common--who
absorbed his message most deeply.
In 1897 Herzl convened the First Zionist Congress in Basel,
Switzerland. The first congress adopted the goal: "To create for
the Jewish people a home in Palestine secured by Public Law." The
World Zionist Organization
(WZO--see Glossary) was founded to work
toward this goal, and arrangements were made for future congresses.
The WZO established a general council, a central executive, and a
congress, which was held every year or two. It developed member
societies worldwide, continued to encourage settlement in
Palestine, registered a bank in London, and established the Jewish
National Fund (Keren Kayemet) to buy land in Palestine. The First
Zionist Congress was vital to the future development of Zionism,
not only because it established an institutional framework for
Zionism but also because it came to symbolize for many Jews a new
national identity, the first such identity since the destruction of
the Second Temple in A.D. 70.
Data as of December 1988
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