Zionism

The Forerunners of Zionism

Prior to the formal establishment of the Zionist organization and the convening of the first Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland, in August 1897, there were several educators and spiritual leaders who wrote about the necessity and inevitability of a Jewish national awakening as a precondition for redemption and salvation. The common theme with all these thinkers was that saving the Jews from persecution is possible only through the return to their ancient homeland and resettling the land of Israel. These early advocates of national deliverance and emancipation came to be known as the precursors of Zionism. Three persons, in particular, with differing personalities and disparate backgrounds and beliefs emerged as passionate advocates of Zionism. They were Rabbi Zvi Kalischer (1795–1874), an Ashkenazi Orthodox Rabbi from northern Poland; Rabbi Yehuda Alkalai (1798–1878), a Sephardi Orthodox Rabbi from Serbia; and Moses Hess (1812–1875), a secular communist philosopher and a colleague of Marx and Engels. The two rabbis, unlike their peers, believed that self-help and activism are not heretical but a part of the divine intervention of saving the Jews and restoring their status as the chosen people. However, it must happen in two stages, the first being the actual return to Zion, which would then enable the coming of the Messiah and the full redemption of Israel. Hess, on the other hand, wholeheartedly believed in the ingathering of Jews from all their exile communities because assimilation among the Gentiles could never work. In a striking departure from his earlier conviction, that universal education and emancipation would promote and facilitate the assimilation of Jews in their host societies, violent anti-Semitic [Page 1404]outbursts all over Europe convinced Hess that only immigration to Zion and the establishment of a socialist society there is the viable solution for the survival of Judaism. Thus, from ostensibly opposing points of departure, the three prominent harbingers of Zionism reached similar conclusions. In their major literary works Seeking Zion (1862), A Lot for the Lord (1957), and Rome and Jerusalem (1862), respectively, they exerted a significant influence on Zionist leaders, even on the founder of the movement, Theodore Herzl, who as a secular man admitted that he never would have written his seminal The Jewish State if he had not read Hess's Rome and Jerusalem first.

...