The Start of Zionism
When the modern movement of return to the land - which
came to be known as Zionism - began in the last decades of the nineteenth
century, for many Jews the relationship to the Land changed yet again.
Israel was once more viewed as a genuine contemporary option for Jewish
life.
In the last years of the century, thousands of Jews began
to move there with the intention of creating the basis for a modern
Jewish society. For many Jews - who had relegated the country to the
realm of the mythical - Zionism reclaimed it as a living, breathing
land, a place where you could live and farm the earth; a place where,
increasingly, you could speak again the ancient and somewhat fossilized
Hebrew language, a place where you could talk about a real living Jewish
future and not just a great Jewish past or a vague messianic hope. The
name of the game was building a life - for many this became a real option,
especially as numerous countries harshened their attitudes and their
treatment of Jews.
Moneys were collected all over the world to support the
new settlers and settlements or to buy land and plant trees. Fundraising
- in the old pre-Temple destruction tradition of the half shekel for
the Temple, together with the still practised tradition of sending money
to the communities of scholars and residents of Eretz Yisrael - were
now became harnessed to Zionism. Institutions like the Keren Kayemet
LeYisrael (the Jewish National Fund) developed and became increasingly
prominent in the life of much of world Jewry. Zionism was on the map.
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Opposition to Zionism - Battle Lines
There were many Jews who were not pleased with the new
developments. Traditional, orthodox Jews in central and eastern Europe
struggled with the new idea and tried to find ways of merging their
traditional messianic ideas with the new political ideas of Zionism.
Some joined the movement and tried to work within it to influence the
direction of Zionism, which they saw as a step on the way to the messianic
redemption. Others remained outside and strongly criticized the movement
for its brazen attempt to replace God's messianic plan with a human
one. The Zionists were undermining God.
Another group which vehemently rejected the new position
proned by Zionism was much of emancipated western Jewry, who had invested
so much effort over the last generations to prove to the outside world
that they linked their fates with their non- Jewish neighbours in a
common homeland of France, Germany or the United States. To them, Zionism
was a threat, which risked undermining all their still precarious achievements,
by proclaiming to the world what they themselves had utterly rejected:
namely, that Eretz Yisrael was the homeland of the Jews. Thus, they
fought it.
There were other Jews in the West who viewed Zionism
as a reasonable and even an important option - but simply not for them.
Zionism was a movement for those who needed a place of refuge from poverty
or persecution, and they would support it as an important option for
those less fortunate than themselves.
Thus, the battle lines were soon drawn up. Zionism had
succeeded in thoroughly shaking up the Jewish world in its approach
to the Land of Israel. Many enthusiastically embraced the new relationship
that Zionism proposed and saw themselves as participants in the new
national drama, either as actors or as a supportive audience. Others
stood aside, opposed. Few were indifferent.
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Dismissing the Galut in Zionist Ideology
Zionism analyzed the world in general, and the Jewish
world in particular, in extremely ideological terms. It tended to develop
a very black and white attitude towards many aspects of Jewish life
- including the Galut.
Zionism always defined itself as superior to Galut and
the Jew of the Galut, whom it depicted in the most uncomplimentary terms:
they were 'weak' and 'powerless; 'leechlike' and 'parasitic'; they represented
the 'old' as opposed to the 'new'; their way of life was 'unnatural'
and 'abnormal'. In short, they were portrayed in a totally negative
light, in contradistinction to the new, brave, strong Zionist Jew who
- living in her or his own land - represented the future - the only
future - of the Jewish People. Zionism viewed the world around it in
the strictest ideological terms, all was analyzed and categorized; there
could be no deviation. Zion was good, ergo the Galut was bad.
This abrupt and wholesale dismissal of the Galut was
something fundamentally unworthy of continued existence in most of the
central Zionist thinkers. Some were more extreme than others, like Jacob
Klatzkin, who wrote, for example;-
"Perhaps our people can maintain itself in the Galut,
but it will not exist in its true dimensions - not in the prime of its
national character. Galut can only drag out the disgrace of our people
and sustain the existence of a people disfigured in both body and soul
- in a word, of a horror. At the very most, it can maintain us in a
state of national impurity and breed some sort of outlandish creature...neither
Jew nor Gentile - in any case not a true national type."
The sterotyped picture of 'Galut' and the 'Galut' Jew
that Klatzkin and all the other major Zionist thinkers developed, actually
derived from the Eastern European milieu with which they were so familiar
- but which had declined considerably, a fact of which they were unaware.
For that world was, in many ways, a world in process of disintegration:
the vast majority of Jews were impoverished; community structures were
in chaos; Jews were subject to the most terrible cruelties and were
largely defenseless to deal with them and impotent in their reactions.
These thinkers took the reality that they had experienced and even left
behind them in Eastern Europe, and extrapolated the model to Jewries
over the world. They could not do otherwise - Zionism was based on a
total analysis, a very black and white theory which had no room for
'ifs' and 'buts'.
And in this way, the Zionist idea which developed as
a reaction to the Eastern European Jewish world came to incorporate
all Jewries, including the Jewries of the west.
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