I. 6.
Onwards to Zionism
It is with all this background that we now turn to the movement
that is called Zionism. There are a number of different stages, even in early
Zionism. The word itself was coined only in the early 1890s (by Natan Birnbaum,
a fascinating figure who started out as an assimilated Jewish student and
ended up amongst the leadership of the Agudat Israel movement). Prior to this,
the movement tends to be called Hibbat Zion
[Love of Zion] and its proponents Hovevei
Zion [Lovers of Zion]. The roots of these groups can be detected in the
1860s, but their growth is also related to the pogroms in the Russian Pale
of Settlement in 1881. These attacks on the Jews, of a kind and scope that
had not been evident for several generations, opened up an enormous debate
in the Jewish street about the question of emigration from Russia.
Two main schools of thought arose:
- The masses quickly started to vote with their feet, choosing America and
the West.
- However, a number of young intellectual figures, who would later emerge
as a cadre of leaders within Eastern European Jewry, supported the idea of
emigration to the old-new land of Zion. For them it was not only that the
Jews had left the ghetto, but rather, that Judaism had also come out of its
closed environment.
According to these circles, Judaism now faced a crisis as it encountered
an ocean of foreign culture that could only be managed, if the Jews recreated
their national home in their historic homeland. By creating a homeland of
their own, the Jews would be able to negotiate their relationship with European
values and beliefs without being swamped by their immediate environment. America
might be a solution for the individual, but could it also provide an answer
to the spiritual and cultural needs of the Jewish masses, they asked.
And so, under the slogan of “Auto-Emancipation,” a
number of societies began to form, calling for immigration to and productive
labour in Eretz Yisrael. Even before the phrase was born, the idea of practical
Zionism began to create a stir in sections of the Jewish public. In the early
1880s, many groups began to prepare their Aliyah with the hope of founding
agricultural settlements in the Land of Israel.
At this point, the Zionist story splits into three, if connected
parts.
- The first concerns the practical developments in Eretz Yisrael as waves
of immigration began to transform the small Jewish community into a viable
basis for a national home.
- The second concerns the development of a Zionist movement and organisation
whose diplomatic efforts and political structure would provide the tools for
the establishment of an autonomous Jewish community in Palestine.
- The third concerns the emergence of competing streams of Zionist thought
and their interaction.
Without any one of the three parts, there would have been no whole:
the state of Israel is a result of their interaction.
We will briefly survey the first of these and then turn to the
second and third in more detail, examining the practical and theoretical underpinnings
of Zionism as an ideology.
We understand the term ideology to mean:
“a coherent, action-orientated set of ideas that provides those
who subscribe to it with a comprehensive cognitive map of their position and
purposes.”
Shils and Friedrich