Zionism and Theodore Herzl
Overview
Zionism and the Jewish Question
The rise of nationalism in Europe in the 19th century inspired the scattered and often persecuted Jewish communities across Europe to hope for an independent Jewish state in their ancient homeland.
Learning Objectives
- Examine the history of the Jewish Diaspora.
- Analyze the political, ethnic, and religious history of the Jews and Palestine during the 19th century that shaped the creation of Israel after the Second World War.
Key Terms / Key Concepts
Talmud: a collection of commentaries on the Torah that was compiled by rabbis (Jewish scholars/teachers) between the 3rd and 6th centuries CE
Sephardic Jews: the Jewish diaspora population that developed in Andalusia in Spain and adopted Arabic customs and language
pogrom: a violent riot aimed at the massacre or persecution of an ethnic or religious group, particularly one aimed at Jews; a term that originally entered the English language to describe 19th and 20th century attacks on Jews in the Russian Empire
Ashkenazi Jews: a Jewish diaspora population who coalesced as a distinct community in the Holy Roman Empire around the end of the first millennium (The traditional diaspora language is Yiddish.)
Theodor Herzl: an Austro-Hungarian journalist, playwright, political activist, and writer; one of the fathers of modern political Zionism; formed the World Zionist Organization and promoted Jewish migration to Palestine in an effort to form a Jewish state (Israel).
Exceptionalist Ideology: the perception or belief that a particular entity (i.e. a society, institution, movement, people) is "exceptional" (unusual or extraordinary); implies that this entity is superior in some way
The Jewish Diaspora
The diaspora or dispersal of Jews out of ancient Judea (Modern Israel and the Palestinian Territories) began as early as 586 BCE when the Babylonian king, Nebuchadnezzar sacked Jerusalem, the capital of the Judean kingdom, and forcibly removed thousands of the city’s inhabitants to Babylon—present-day southern Iraq. Eventually Jews migrated across much of Europe and western Asia.
During the Hellenistic period (323 – 31 BCE), many Jews emigrated from Judea and settled in Greek cities in various Hellenistic kingdoms, such as Alexandria in Egypt. In the 3rd century BCE, the Jewish Holy Scriptures —also known as the Christian Old Testament—was made available in a Greek translation meant for Greek-speaking Jews; this translation of the scriptures became known as the Septuagint. Jewish historians such as Josephus (first century CE), and philosophers, such as Philo of Alexandria (first century CE), composed works in ancient Greek.
When the entire basin of the Mediterranean Sea became incorporated into the expanding Roman Empire by 31 BCE, Jews were migrating throughout the extent of the Roman Empire. The revolt of Judea against Roman rule in 66 CE, as well as the subsequent destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE by Roman armies, accelerated the migration of Jews from Judea to other regions both within and outside the Roman Empire. A second rebellion against Rome—the Bar Kokhba Revolt (c. 132 – 136 CE) —further intensified the emigration of the Jewish population out of Judea after Roman armies brutally crushed this uprising. Despite these revolts, the Jewish population generally prospered under Roman rule. Archaeologists have uncovered the ruins of Jewish synagogues or places of worship in the cities of the Roman Empire. Their numbers grew with the conversion of some non-Jews to the Jewish faith.
During the Middle Ages, most Jews lived areas ruled by both Christian and Muslim states that had formally been part of or near to the Roman Empire. In these centuries, Jewish community life centered around the synagogue, where Jews gathered to pray and hear their holy scriptures under the leadership of a rabbi (teacher/scholar). Rabbis were not only experts in the study of the Torah—which became the first five books of the Old Testament—but also in the Talmud, which is a collection of commentaries and teachings on the Torah, as compiled by rabbis in Judea and southern modern-day Iraq between the 3rd and 6th centuries CE.
In some regions just outside the former Roman Empire, non-Jewish peoples converted to the Jewish faith in large numbers. Arabs in Yemen in the southern Arabian Peninsula converted to Judaism, which was the state religion of the Himyarite kingdom in the 5th and early sixth century CE until the neighboring Christian kingdom of Aksum—modern Ethiopia—dethroned the last Jewish king in that land. In the 8th century CE, the ruling elite of the Khazars, a Turkish people then inhabiting modern Ukraine, converted to Judaism.
Jews living in Muslim lands in the Middle Ages were generally free to practice their faith if they paid the poll tax—Jizyah—to their Muslim rulers. After the conquest of Spain by the Muslim Arabs and Moors in the 8th century CE, the Jewish population in Muslim Spain (Andalusia) thrived and became known as Sephardic Jews, who adopted the Arabic language and some Arabic customs. In the 12th century, the eminent Jewish rabbi and physician, Maimonides—a native of Andalusia—composed multiple philosophical and scientific works in Arabic, which drew inspiration from the works of earlier Greek and Arabic scholars.
Jews inhabiting Christian lands in the Middle Ages often didn’t enjoy the same level of toleration as experienced in Muslim controlled territories. Jews were segregated from the Christian population and often inhabited a special quarter of Medieval towns known as the ghetto. In 1215 at the influential Fourth Lateran Council in Rome, Pope Innocent III and a council of Church leaders decreed that Jews be required to wear special clothing to distinguish them from the Christian population. This same council also ruled that Jews were not to be allowed to hold any public office. The Jewish population in Christian lands were also frequently subject to massacres by angry mobs, which became known as pogroms. For example, in 1096, after Pope Urban II called for a Crusade to free Jerusalem from the Muslim Turks, Christian mobs massacred thousands of Jews living in Medieval cities along the Rhine River in modern Germany. Many Christians at that time understood the Pope’s call for the Crusade as a command to destroy the enemies of Christianity, including both Muslims and Jews. Across Medieval Europe beginning in the 13th century, the so-called “blood libel” stirred up such pogroms. The “blood libel” was a popular belief among Christians across Europe; part of this belief was the allegation that Jews kidnapped Christian children so that they could kill the children and drink their blood in secret religious rituals. Some Christian states even expelled Jews entirely from their lands. In 1290, Edward I of England evicted all Jews from his kingdom. Jews only returned to England nearly four hundred later in 1657, after the Commonwealth of Oliver Cromwell invited Jews to return. In 1492, Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain expelled all Jews and Muslims from Spain who refused to convert to Christianity; this was done after their conquest of the Emirate of Granada—the last Muslim state in Spain. Many Sephardic Jews from Spain consequently emigrated to the Muslim Ottoman Empire in North Africa and western Asia, as well as to the Netherlands in northern Europe.
The Netherlands and Poland were Christian regions where Jews in the Middle Ages and Early Modern era enjoyed a relative high degree of toleration. In 1264, Prince Boreslaw of Poland invited Jews from the neighboring Holy Roman Empire—modern Germany—to settle in Poland by granting Jews full freedom to worship, as well as by forbidding false accusations of the “blood libel” against Jews. The Mongols in 1240 had recently invaded and devasted Poland, and the migration of Jews helped to repopulate the region. The Jewish population flourished in the centuries that followed and stretched across the vast Polish-Lithuanian Kingdom, which by 1500 extended from the Baltic to the Black Sea and included not only the area of modern Poland but also the Baltic counties of Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia, as well as Ukraine and Belarus. The Jews of this region who had migrated from Germany and France to the Polish kingdom became known as Ashkenazi Jews and spoke their own distinct language which incorporated both the German and Hebrew languages: Yiddish.
The prosperity experienced by Ashkenazi Jews ended with the collapse of the Polish Lithuanian Kingdom in the 17th and 18th centuries. In 1648, the Cossacks, nomadic herdsmen from Ukraine, revolted against the Polish Kingdom and massacred the populations of many Jewish communities. The Cossacks were allied with the emerging Russian Empire due to their common Orthodox Christian faith; whereas, the Polish rulers were Roman Catholic. In the late 18th century, the dominant states of Eastern and Central Europe, Hapsburg Austria, Prussia, and Russia, partitioned the weakened Polish kingdom among themselves. Russia acquired the largest chunk of Polish territory. Consequently, much of the Jewish population of the region fell under Russian rule. As subjects of the Russian Empire, Jews faced persecution. The Russian state in 1791 mandated for the Jews a “Pale of Settlement,” which was a narrow stretch of territory extending from the Ukraine to the Baltic Sea. They forbid Jews from settling or living permanently outside of this area.
Liberalism, Nationalism, and the Jews
Jewish communities across Europe generally welcomed the rise of Liberal constitutions in some European countries that resulted from the revolutions that occurred across the continent in the first half of the 19th century. These constitutions guaranteed representative government, equal rights under the law and freedom of religion. Some Jews even entered politics in this era. For example, Ferdinand Lassalle (1825 – 1864) was the son of a Jewish silk merchant in the German kingdom of Prussia in what is today Poland. During the 1848 Revolution, he strongly supported the unsuccessful efforts to unite Germany under a Liberal constitution. In 1863 he helped organize the General German Workers Union in Prussia, which was committed to securing the right to vote for all adult males—also known as universal male suffrage. Lassalle even personally contacted the Prussian chancellor Otto Von Bismarck to urge him to support the expansion of the right to vote for all German workers. In 1867, the constitution of the North German Confederation advanced by Bismarck did in fact include universal male suffrage. This constitution later became the basis for the German constitution with the unification of Germany in 1871. After Lassalle’s death in 1864, the General German Workers Union, which he founded, became the German Social Democratic Party in 1875, the oldest political party in Germany today.
By the late 19th century, large numbers of Jews were emigrating from the Russian Empire, whose autocratic Conservative government continued to treat Jews as second-class citizens. These Jews settled in areas of the globe where Liberal governments were in place, such as the United States, Canada, Australia, and in some South American republics, such as Argentina. In general Jews prospered in these regions. For example, in the United States, President Woodrow Wilson in 1916 nominated Louis Brandeis to become the first Jewish Supreme Court Justice.
Across Europe, even in the most Liberal countries, the population often viewed Jews with suspicion due to their distinct religion and culture. For example, the people of France were often staunchly Roman Catholic, such as the Bretons of Brittany in rural northwest France. They were also highly suspicious of the inhabitants of the French capital Paris, who had a reputation for their cosmopolitan and secular attitudes. Conservative Roman Catholics in France were distrustful of the country's religious minorities, Protestants and Jews. France was rocked by the Dreyfus Affair in 1894. Alfred Dreyfus, a French military officer, who was a Jew, was put on trial and found guilty of treason for spying for Germany. Even though a military commission exonerated Dreyfus later in 1906, this affair stirred up much antisemitism across France among many Roman Catholics who maintained that France was in fact a Roman Catholic nation.
Besides a rise in Liberalism, the 19th century also experienced a rise in nationalism. Many Jews due to this rising nationalism in the 19th century opted to assimilate and to adopt the culture and religion of the nation where they resided. For example, in 1816 the family of Benjamin Disraeli converted to Christianity from Judaism and joined the Anglican Church of England when Benjamin was just a boy. Benjamin Disraeli would later serve as one the most influential prime ministers of Great Britain in the 19th century.
Zionism: A Jewish Homeland
Zionism is the national movement of the Jewish people that supports the re-establishment of a Jewish homeland in the territory defined as the historic Land of Israel—roughly corresponding to Palestine, Canaan, or the Holy Land.
After almost two millennia of the Jewish people residing in various countries without a national state, the Zionist movement was founded in the late 19th century by secular Jews, largely as a response by Ashkenazi Jews to rising antisemitism in Europe, which was exemplified by the Dreyfus affair in France and the anti-Jewish pogroms in the Russian Empire. The political movement was formally established by the Austro-Hungarian journalist, Theodore Herzyl, in 1897, following the publication of his book Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State). At that time, the movement sought to encourage Jewish migration to what was by then Ottoman Palestine.
Herzl considered antisemitism an eternal feature of all societies in which Jews lived as minorities, and that only a separation could allow Jews to escape eternal persecution. “Let them give us sovereignty over a piece of the Earth’s surface, just sufficient for the needs of our people, then we will do the rest!” he proclaimed.
Herzl proposed two possible destinations to colonize, Argentina and Palestine. He preferred Argentina for its vast and sparsely populated territory and temperate climate, but he conceded that Palestine would have greater attraction because of the historic ties of Jews with that area. He also agreed to evaluate Joseph Chamberlain’s proposal for possible Jewish settlement in Great Britain’s East African colonies.
Although initially one of several Jewish political movements offering alternative responses to assimilation and antisemitism, Zionism expanded rapidly. In its early stages, supporters considered setting up a Jewish state in the historic territory of Palestine. After World War II and the destruction of Jewish life in Central and Eastern Europe, where these alternative movements were rooted, Zionism became the dominant view about a Jewish national state.
Creating an alliance with Great Britain and securing support for Jewish emigration to Palestine, Zionists also recruited European Jews to immigrate there, especially those who lived in areas of the Russian Empire where antisemitism was prevalent. The alliance with Britain was strained as the latter realized the implications of the Jewish movement for Arabs in Palestine, but the Zionists persisted. During World War II antisemitism in Europe reached a horrible climax with the Holocaust, a mass genocide, when the German Nazi regime slaughtered an estimated six million Jews living in Europe. After these horrors during the war, the Zionist movement received worldwide support and was eventually successful in encouraging the victorious WWII Allies to establish Israel as the homeland for the Jewish people on May 14, 1948. The proportion of the world’s Jews living in Israel has steadily grown since the movement emerged.
Until 1948, the primary goals of Zionism were the re-establishment of Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel, in-gathering of the exiles, and liberation of Jews from the antisemitic discrimination and persecution they experienced during their diaspora. Since the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, Zionism continues primarily to advocate on behalf of Israel and to address threats to its continued existence and security.
Major aspects of the Zionist idea are represented in the Israeli Declaration of Independence:
“The Land of Israel was the birthplace of the Jewish people. Here their spiritual, religious and political identity was shaped. Here they first attained to statehood, created cultural values of national and universal significance and gave to the world the eternal Book of Books.
After being forcibly exiled from their land, the people kept faith with it throughout their Dispersion and never ceased to pray and hope for their return to it and for the restoration in it of their political freedom.
Impelled by this historic and traditional attachment, Jews strove in every successive generation to re-establish themselves in their ancient homeland. In recent decades they returned in their masses.”
Advocates of Zionism view it as a national liberation movement for the repatriation of a persecuted people who were forced to live as minorities in a variety of nations that did not include their ancestral homeland. Critics of Zionism view it as a racist and exceptionalist ideology that led advocates to violence against Palestinians, followed by the exodus of Palestinians and the subsequent denial of their human rights.
Attributions
Adapted from:
https://courses.lumenlearning.com/boundless-worldhistory/chapter/israel-and-palestine/
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
Title Image
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Theodor_Herzl.jpg
Carl Pietzner, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons