Mount Zion is a low, wide hill located on the south side of Jerusalem, the thrice-holy city. Although its physical location has changed throughout history, its status as a symbol of the city and of Israel as a whole, as the promised land that Yahweh granted to the Jewish people, dates back to biblical texts and has remained until today. . Tradition indicates that the Second Temple was built on Zion and that King David is buried there. Etymologically Zion means strength.
For centuries, the Jewish diaspora, always mistreated and persecuted, dreamed of returning to Zion, more as a metaphor for achieving redemption as a people, linked to the arrival of the Messiah, than as a physical return to the land of their ancestors. “Next year, in Jerusalem,” many Hebrews have said to each other as a greeting since the time of the Roman Empire. But it was not until the 19th century, and as a genuinely European movement, that part of the Jewish world considered the real option of returning and settling in the lands of Palestine, understanding that this was the only possible way of real emancipation in the face of hostility. incessant environment.
To explain Zionism as a modern political movement, we must go back to the complex adaptation of the Jews to the Europe that was born after the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. Except for the case of the Iberian Peninsula – expelled in 1492 – the Jews lived scattered throughout the continent, although especially in the East, where they were concentrated in the so-called Settlement Zone, a corridor organized by the Russian Empire that included the current Poland and the Baltic republics in the north to Western Ukraine in the south. Around 70% of European Jews resided in the region, divided between rural areas – the famous Jewish villages or shtetl – and urban areas. 85% of the 3.2 million Jews on the planet lived in the Old Continent; only about 45,000, in Palestinian lands.
The liberal revolutions of the first half of the century gave Jews a historic opportunity for emancipation and integration into European societies. If feudal Europe with a Christian matrix granted the Hebrews a very restricted role that had the effect of consolidating very closed communities, the end of the privileges proclaimed by the Enlightenment aspired to remove them from the ghetto. This was believed by many Jewish intellectuals who, in the heat of modern ideas, promoted the Haskalah, a movement that demanded more freedom for the community, while at the same time prescribing greater assimilation in the new liberal States and a profound secularization.
It should be noted that Haskalah especially triumphed in Western Europe, precisely where Enlightenment ideas had also permeated and civil liberties were being implemented, but also where Jewish communities were smaller, more prosperous and were already more integrated. In Central Europe and the East, in fact, assimilationist ideas arrived later and only among intellectual classes, and notable traditionalist reactions also occurred. In religion, a first great split took place between supporters of orthodoxy and the reforming currents.
But in any case, at whatever pace it was in each country or empire, the Jewish communities in Europe lived the process with a certain enthusiasm. The liberalization of markets and the emergence of industrial capitalism gave some the opportunity to reconvert the old financial and commercial tradition into economic prosperity. It is the time of the first great Jewish fortunes associated with banking – a small minority – as is the case of the Rothschild saga, but also the rise of a bourgeois middle class. Universities were filled with Jewish students once restrictions were lifted, and many took up liberal and even artistic professions. Jews also participated very actively in the political environment, playing a key role in the triumph of liberal revolutions, first, and in nationalism or socialism, later.
Many took their assimilation process to the limit and chose to change their surnames or abandon Yiddish or Hebrew, if not baptism or intermarriage. A good example is the case of the German Mendelssohn family: the famous philosopher Moses was a key figure of the Haskalah and a great defender of Jewish civil rights during the 18th century, while all of his grandchildren, including the composers Felix and Fanny , had already converted to Protestantism at the beginning of the 19th century. Others, however, tried to make their own identity in the private sphere (linguistic, cultural or religious, as the case may be) compatible with their new status of supposed equality with the so-called Gentiles.
Obviously it wasn’t nearly as pretty. Discrimination, whether legal or in the field of social prejudice, continued. The process of recovery of freedoms was slow and with ups and downs in areas such as the Austrian Empire or the Germanic principalities (it was not complete until the decade of 1865-1875), and totally non-existent in Tsarist Russia, where discrimination remained until the Revolution of 1917. The situation of the Jews in the East led many to emigrate first to the large cities of Western Europe and, later, to the United States or Argentina.
Furthermore, the identity contradiction that the assimilation process entailed was soon felt within the community. The internal debate in the Jewish world was intense and sometimes acrimonious. What did it mean to be Jewish in the new Europe? Broadly speaking, the new Western bourgeois and urban classes embraced assimilation, while the large Eastern community was divided between supporters of gradual integration and the more traditionalists. In part, the poor living conditions in these areas made anything else impossible.
In any case, many Jews were realizing that their efforts to integrate were never enough: even rejecting their cultural roots, being Jewish or “descendant of” did not guarantee full civil freedom. Furthermore, the question loomed: why can’t Jews live their identity naturally at a time when all stateless nations aspire or are achieving emancipation?
The last stages of the 19th century accelerated the debate in the cruelest way. Although anti-Semitism with Christian roots never disappeared, the discontent and general uncertainty in the face of such sudden changes found a favorable scapegoat. The year 1881 is key for the outbreak of modern Judeophobia in Europe. In March, the reformist Tsar Alexander II was assassinated and, at full speed, within the framework of a traditionalist reaction, a wave of more than 200 pogroms (massacres of Jews) would be unleashed in the cities of the settlement area of ??the Russian Empire that It would last until 1884, and would cause a notable Jewish emigration to the West.
More or less in parallel, books and pamphlets began to proliferate in the West that theorized and preached hatred of Jews, within the framework of the new racist ideas in vogue that considered them an inferior race. From there he moved into politics: in 1893, 15 openly anti-Semitic deputies would enter the German Reichtag, while in 1897 Karl Lueger would become mayor of Vienna, a populist politician and demagogue who gained many followers by blaming the Jews for all evils. of the proletariat. A certain Adolf Hitler lived in the atmosphere of that Vienna when he was young. The Dreyfus affair is the episode that remains in the history of that wave: in 1895 France experienced a heated debate over an anti-Semitic conspiracy that caused the humiliating demotion of an army captain of Judeo-Alsatian origin. The case impacted all of Europe.
In this chapter it is also worth mentioning the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion (1902), an anti-Jewish pamphlet falsified by the tsarist police that narrated an alleged international Jewish conspiracy to dominate the world and which had a notable diffusion, also in Western Europe. . The objective was none other than to justify increasingly bloody pogroms and state persecutions, which continued in Russia until the Revolution of 1917.
Once again stigmatized and persecuted, the Jews responded with new ideas. Although assimilationists had already theorized about the Jewish people, awareness grew as the problem worsened. It is then that in Eastern Europe a set of ideas and even practical experiences are born that are already considered proto-Zionist, abandoning utopia and openly speaking of a return to Palestine. Some do so from the rabbinic tradition, while others already propose modern concepts such as the nation.
In this sense, the Ukrainian Leo Pinsker (1821-1891) and his pamphlet Self-Emancipation, published in 1882, were key. In it, this doctor, shocked by the pogroms, sees integration as a failure and encourages the Jews to fight for their independence and maintain their national consciousness in order to recover their homeland in Eretz Israel (Land of Israel). Enjoying a certain prestige among intellectual minorities, Pinsker founded the Hovevei Zion (Lovers of Zion) movement in 1887, a group of pioneers who promoted, among other things, the use of Hebrew as a common language—until then limited to religious rites. and the first settlements in Palestine. Zionism as a political movement was taking shape.
Theodor Herzl (1860-1904) is credited with the fatherhood of modern Zionism. Hungarian by birth but of German culture and language, his merit lies more in the ability he had not only to synthesize all the Zionist ideas written so far, but also to promote organizations that brought together all the tendencies of Jewish nationalism and organize a plan, including in the diplomatic field, to achieve their objectives. It is this double aspect, theoretical and practical, that makes him a key figure for the idea of ????building the future State of Israel.
Son of a family from the emerging petit bourgeoisie of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, he grew up in a liberal and secular environment, and was able to study Law in Vienna. Herzl’s story is that of many of the pioneers of Zionism, who went in a short time from the most convinced assimilationism to Jewish nationalism. It had already happened to Pinsker. It is still surprising that what is now considered the father of Zionism believed at the beginning that these ideas were typical of enlightened people, but Herzl, despite having lived with anti-Semitism since he was a child, was not aware of the problem until very late. In his case, the factor that made him change his mind was the Dreyfus case. While a correspondent in Paris for the Viennese newspaper Neue Freie Presse, he covered the information and, upon returning to Austria, after seeing in situ the anti-Semitic wave in supposedly open France, he began to take an interest in the Jewish question.
His new ideas were published in the short book The State of the Jews: An Essay on a Modern Solution to the Jewish Question (1896), in which, after renouncing assimilation, he advocated a plan for the collective emigration of all Jews to a sovereign territory. He pointed to two options, Argentina and Palestine, and stressed that the new State must be liberal, modern, neutral, egalitarian and progressive. Although the first reception of his argument was rather cold, both among the most assimilated sectors and among the most traditionalists, the path was laid out: Herzl would dedicate the rest of his days to convincing locals and strangers of the suitability of the plan. of the.
Thus, what followed was detailed planning for the construction of the future State, with special emphasis on diplomacy. Herzl refused to start mass emigration to Palestine and preferred to first build a network of contacts to convince the international community that a State was necessary as a perennial solution to the Jewish problem. In parallel to his numerous conversations with high leaders, he built the institutions of Zionism: he founded the weekly Die Welt, he promoted the design of a national flag, he dedicated numerous efforts to seeking financing for the cause, he brought together all currents – from liberals to socialists , from secular to religious—in the World Zionist Organization and promoted the first World Congress in Basel (1897).
In a short time Zionism became a recognized movement. In the last years of his life, Herzl maintained the diplomatic effort, going so far as to propose an alternative Jewish state in Uganda, a plan quickly discarded by his traveling companions. Although he did not obtain great results in the geopolitical field, he died leaving the seed sown: the idea that the Jewish people was a nation like the others that had the right to a State had already been established and the folder was already in the most influential chancelleries.
It is important to emphasize that Zionism, in its initial phase, was only one of the paths that the Jewish world took to seek a solution, but not the only one and not even the one that generated the most consensus. It is not unreasonable to affirm that the Zionist path was not massive among European Jews until the shoah. Many maintained the assimilationist path, while others, especially in Russia, opted for internationalist Marxism, therefore rejecting Herzl’s plans. And, in fact, many ultra-orthodox religious people disdained it by making it anti-Talmudic, in the sense that the return to the promised land was only possible, according to the texts, with the arrival of the Messiah. Even today these discrepancies remain.
With the death of Herzl, the line of accelerating emigration to Palestine was imposed and, as a consequence of the new Russian pogroms, the first great aliyah (emigration) to the future Israel took place between 1904-1914. The road to the State that was born in 1948 would be long: a new conflict now began, the inevitable and predictably tragic clash with the Arab community that had lived in those lands for centuries. And that’s where we are.