Zionism

ZIONISM IS THE political philosophy that follows the idea of a national homeland for the Jewish people. Eventually, Zionists believe that this should be in Palestine. Although in 70 c.e., the Roman General Titus, son of the Emperor Vespasian, had driven the Jews out of Jerusalem, many still remained in the country. Flavius Josephus, the historian of the Jewish war, wrote that “the army had no more people to slay or to plunder, because there remained none to be objects of their fury.” Defying the Romans, Palestine remained throughout the Middle Ages and the Ottoman Empire (1453–1918) a vibrant center for Jewish religious thought. This was especially true in the region around Safed, which in the 17th century would become the center for study of the Kabala, Jewish mysticism.

However, the destruction of Jerusalem marked the great diaspora, or expansion of the Jews throughout the world: too many, it should be noted, first as Roman slaves. Over the centuries, in Germany, the Russian Empire, and Poland, the Jews would develop an extremely intense sense of themselves and their mission in the world as the Chosen People, who would prepare an unsanctified world for the coming of the Meshiach, the Messiah. The most zealous school in Germany and Eastern Europe was the Hasidim, who practiced an ecstatic Judaism that seemed out of place to their more conservative landsmen, or brethren. Gershom Sholem, in Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism notes that “the Hasidim were intimately connected with the whole of Jewish life and the religious interests of the common folk.” As such, the Hasid community served a conserving interest by binding together the Jews they served in the face of sometimes barbaric persecution, the dreaded pogroms.

At the same time, the Jewish people developed a language of their own, Yiddish, which became a cultural bond among them against the oppressive outer society. Within the ghettoes to which they were confined, Yiddish led to a bountiful courage, whose most visible light was Sholom Aleichem, the origin of the famous musical about Teyve, Fiddler on the Roof. As Miriam Weinstein wrote in Yiddish: A Nation of Words, “Yiddish was accruing a consciousness of its past and a mission for its future.”

While Yiddish was helping to develop a strong sense of community within East European Jewry with its spirit of Yiddishkeit, another movement grew up that was able to take advantage of the closely knit society that Hasidism and Yiddishkeit had created. This was Zionism, which to the history of Jewry was politically what the Hasids were to religion and Yiddish to culture. While Moses Hess had been writing along Zionist lines in the 1840s, it was the conservative Theodore Herzl who, in 1897, made Zionism a political force with an impact in both Europe and America. To pious Jews, Zionism [Page 951]represented the great aliyah, or “coming together” of the Jewish people in their ancestral home of Palestine centuries after Titus's barbaric diaspora.

Actual Jewish resettlement of the Holy Land began in 1855 with land purchases from Arab landowners by Sir Moses Montefiore. From Hess would come the socialism that would become the force that bound Zionism together—yet also enforced something of a rigidity into this philosophy. Walter Laqueur wrote in A History of Zionism: From the French Revolution to the Establishment of the State of Israel that “for Hess, a Jewish state was not anend in itself but a means toward the just social order to which all peoples aspired.” Jewish settlement continued in the Holy Land throughout the end of the 19th century and early 20th, either with the backing of noted Zionists like the Rothschild family or individually as refugees from the pogroms that convulsed the traditional Jewish areas of settlement in Eastern Europe and Russia. While much land was purchased from the Arabs, other marauding Arabs, like Bedouin tribesmen, would attack the growing Jewish agricultural settlements.

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