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WEEKLY NEWSLETTER
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Israel
Index
Desert west of the Dead Sea in the occupied West Bank
Courtesy Les Vogel
The Jordan River in northern Israel, east of Bet Shean
Courtesy Les Vogel
The impulse and development of Zionism was almost exclusively
the work of Ashkenazim--Jews of European origin; few
Sephardim (see Glossary)
were directly engaged in the movement in its formative
years. (In 1900 about 9.5 million of the world's 10.5 million Jews
were Ashkenazim, and about 5.2 million of the Ashkenazim lived in
the Pale of Settlement.)
The first writings in what later came to be known as Zionism
appeared in the mid-1800s. In 1840 the Jews of Eastern Europe and
the Balkans had been aroused by rumors that the messianic era was
at hand. Various writers, most prominently Rabbi Judah Alkalai and
Rabbi Zevi Hirsch Kalisher but including many others, were
impressed by the nationalist fervor of Europe that was creating new
nation-states and by the resurgence of messianic expectations among
Jews. Kalisher wrote that Jewish nationalism was directly akin to
other nationalist movements and was the logical continuation of the
Jewish enlightenment that had begun in France in 1791 when Jews
were granted civil liberties. Alkalai consciously altered his
expectations from a miraculous messianic salvation to a redemption
by human effort that would pave the way for the arrival of the
messiah. Both authors urged the development of Jewish national
unity, and Kalisher in particular foresaw the ingathering to
Palestine of many of the world's Jews as part of the process of
emancipation.
Another important early Zionist was Moses Hess, a German Jew
and socialist comrade of Karl Marx. In his book Rome and
Jerusalem, published in 1862, Hess called for the establishment
of a Jewish socialist commonwealth in Palestine. He was one of the
first Jewish thinkers to see that emancipation would ultimately
exacerbate anti-Semitism in Europe. He concluded that the only
solution to the Jewish problem was the establishment of a national
Jewish society managed by a Jewish proletariat. Although his
synthesis of socialism and Jewish nationalism would later become an
integral part of the Labor Zionist movement, during his lifetime
the prosperity of European Jewry lessened the appeal of his work.
Data as of December 1988
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